Compulsively Aimless

I mentioned I liked roads. It's a recurring theme of this blog starting with my cross country drive of my own. I've collected a lot of books on roads. Here's one category of books on the history of roadbuilding and of particular American highways.    1.   First Highways of America: A Pictorial History of American Roads and Highways from 1900-1925 , John Butler (1994). A history of the dirt-rock-to-pavement of America's early roads.  Fantastic black and white pictures of early cars, road construction and landscapes.  Bought new. 2.   Coast to Coast by Automobile: The Pioneering Trips, 1899-1908 , Curt McConnell (2000).   A collection of early automobile adventures across the the U.S.  The appendix includes a great chronology of early automobile trips. Bought new.       3.   U.S. 1: America's Original Main Street , Andrew Malcolm, Photographs by Roger Straus III (1991). Sometimes called America's original Main St...

Before there's the American dream of owning a home--there's the dream of driving cross country.   The ancient Greeks had the Odyssey, modern Americans have roads to drive and a continent to cross.  Driving from Washington to Seattle, down the Pacific coast and back along the southern route was a personal milestone.  Everyone should do it once.  My grandfather did it in 1919 and I did it in 1988.  The experience guided my book buying.  In honor of the Fourth, here are some of my books on the great American right of passage.  1.  On the Road, Jack Kerouac (1957).   My only fiction in the group but it had to be included.  Captures the spirit of driving cross country and ends with a homage to the dark fields of the Republic.   Bought new. 2.  Cross Country: Fifteen Years and 90,000 miles on the Roads and Interstates of American..., Robert Sullivan (2006).  A greatest hits collection of all the best c...