Nolan’s Summer Reading

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Joseph Heller in Catch-22 says something to the extent of no matter how long a summer seems to last it’s never long enough.  He clearly hasn’t spent these months in Texas.  HEY-YO!!! *Insert Cricket Noise*   But I do agree with the sentiment.  Or I used to when I was still in school and had a built-in three month vacation every year.  Now  jobs have made summers simply the time of year it’s hot when I go to work.  But I still hold on to one element when the freedom of summer still exists: the freedom of the summer road trip.  Here are my three essential road trip reads:

On The Road by Jack Kerouac 

With the movie coming out this summer, I think this will be a big read regardless of what my opinion is.  But those who have read On The Road before know that even in a best case scenario, it will be hard for the film to capture the energetic chaos with which Kerouac wrote the original.  There’s something invincible about summer, like all the miles and parties and drugs and anti-heroes you meet can’t stand in your way long enough to see what’s over the next sunrise.  As the quote goes, “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live…” and no one is more mad or alive than a Kerouac junkie on a summer road trip.

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Any Texan, native or transplant, hitting the road this summer needs to have read Lonesome Dove.  I’m not sure if you can call yourself a Texan if you haven’t.  To see this landscape, you need to have seen it through Larry McMurtry’s eyes and understand that out in the wildness of the road, you’ll need the honor and bond of your best friends with you.  This book is a long one, but you’ll hardly need a summer to get through it.  You’ll breeze through like so many yellow lines on the highway.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  by Mark Twain

Americans are a romantic people and it’d be hard to find anyone more romantic than Mark Twain.  It’s my opinion that if every person had to read one book in their lifetime, this would be it.  There are a lot of people in this country from all walks of life as you’ll hopefully find, for better or worse, on your journeys.  I think everyone should walk in Huck’s shoes at some point.  To freely make their own choices, their own judgments, take their own path and know when to say, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.”