Blue Highways

I really loved this book. It is not as funny as Travels with Charlie by Steinbeck, but I loved the slice of Americana that the author encountered during his trip in the 70s. 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

One wintry day in 1978, thirty-eight-year-old English professor William Least Heat-Moon learned that neither his employer nor his wife would be needing him anymore. Lying awake that night, he was struck by an idea, and a quintessentially American idea it was: “A man who couldn’t make things go right could at least go.” A month later, off he went, embarking upon a journey along the back roads of the United States, the two-lane highways marked in blue on old road maps. Deciding to travel in a circle instead of a straight line (to provide himself the promise of coming round again), Heat-Moon left his native Missouri for a three-month, thirteen-thousand-mile journey “in search of places where change did not mean ruin.” Pick up Blue Highways when you have the urge to read and nothing particular on the top of your list: Before Heat-Moon hits Kentucky, you’ll be hooked and eager to relish his wanderings from Nameless, Tennessee, to Remote, Oregon, from Why, Arizona, to Whynot, Mississippi.