Travels with Charley
A quest across America, from the northernmost tip of Maine to California's Monterey Peninsula To hear the speech of the real America, to smell the grass and the tress, to see the colors and the light—these were John Steinbeck's goals as he set out, at the age of fifty-eight, to rediscover the country he had been writing about for so many years. With Charley, his French poodle, Steinbeck drives the interstates and the country roads, dines with truckers, encounters bears at Yellowstone and old friends in San Francisco. And he reflects on the American character, racial hostility, on a particular form of American loneliness he finds almost everywhere, and on the unexpected kindness of strangers that is also a very real part of our national identity. "Pure delight, a pungent potpourri of places and people interspersed with bittersweet essays on everything from the emotional difficulties of growing old to the reasons why giant sequoias arouse such awe." — The New York Times Book Review "Profound, sympathetic, often angry...an honest moving book by one of our great writers." — The San Francisco Examiner "This is superior Steinbeck—a muscular, evocative report of a journey of rediscovery." — John Barkham, Saturday Review Syndicate "The eager, sensuous pages in which he writes about what he found and whom he encountered frame a picture of our human nature in the twentieth century which will not soon be surpassed." — Edward Weeks, The Atlantic Monthly
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14people
2015–2026years
36% recommend57% neutral7% critical
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What Hacker News says
- For me, it's Steinbeck. I think his novels capture the uniqueness American spirit, good and bad. Generosity and stubbornness, a contrast of high ideals and actions that don't always live up to them, but sometimes surpass them. They are practical stories about real people we've probably met but don't fully understand.
Cannery Row, To a God Unknown and Tortilla Flat are easy to read examples of this if you don't want to commit to East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath. Travels with Charley is also a log of America in the 60s, even if you take it as a novel.
I can't argue against Whitman though.
- 100 Books like Project Hail Mary (https://shepherd.com/books-like/project-hail-mary) :
- Travels with Charley : With Charley, his French poodle, Steinbeck drives the interstates and the country roads, dines with truckers, encounters bears at Yellowstone and old friends in San Francisco.
- Invisible Women : Data is fundamental to the modern world. From economic development, to healthcare, to education and public policy, we rely on numbers to allocate resources and make crucial decisions. But because so much data fails to take into account gender, because it treats men as the default and women as atypical, bias and discrimination are baked into our systems. And women pay tremendous costs for this bias, in time, money, and often with their lives.
then, if you love Andy Weir, you'll love this romance novel: The Duke's Christmas Redemption by Arietta Richmond
and then after scrolling through even more book recommendations I'm assuming are just ads:
Interested in time loop, philosophy, and time travel?
which is weird, because Project Hail Mary wasn't about time loops or time travel.
This is why I dislike recommendations on the internet anymore, it's just a cash grab to get some click through profit to amazon.
- I was too. Of all the books I read in high school, none affected me anywhere close to Grapes of Wrath. The book is very mature, and I think it is often given to students too early in life before they can truly appreciate it. But this book should be required reading for Seniors in high school before they go out into the real world.
John Steinbeck also wrote "East of Eden" which I would say was even more impactful of my life, but I didn't read it until my mid-twenties. That book really explores good and evil. It is slightly critical of religion (specifically Christianity), which is why it isn't read in school. But the principles and themes of the book dig really deep into human morals and how we choose our personal values. I really love it.
Lastly, Travels with Charley is a fun view of Americana. It was written much later in Steinbeck's life and is a much easier and lighter read. But its very fun and I recommend it to everyone. It is a personal story of Steinbeck traveling across America in his old age with his dog named Charley. Its fun.
- Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. The first time it was slow read, but I went back the book several times later in life and it has much to tell.
The Glass Beads Game by Herman Hess.
Several books by Steinbeck - Travels with Charley, Log from the Sea of Cortez.
The Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo. A recent penguin translation is superb. Among the saddest and most memorable love stories.
- For those interested in this, check out Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck. It was written in 1962, but I think it holds up well.
An aged Steinbeck feels out of touch with a country he is famous for writing about. To aid this, he travels across the country with his dog to see the America and it's people he has grown away from. He specifically avoids major highways and roads for the reasons people list here.
- That's a trend which has been emerging for a long time. Henry Miller's The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945) is an early take, this is a theme of John Steinbeck's Travels With Charley (1962), though Steinbeck was taking pains to avoid the then-brand-new Interstate Highway System. Two decades later, Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways chronicles a similar trip.
Growth of both suburbs (Levittown, 1947, Interstate Highway System (1956), shopping mall (1950s/60s), and fast food franchises (McDonalds, bought out by Ray Kroc in 1961, Kentucky Fried Chicken, now KFC, 1952), greatly accelerated the trend especially in the 1960s and 1970s, aided by mass-market television advertising.
Homogenisation of US culture, shopping mall / strip mall / franchise culture were all pretty well developed by the 1980s / early 1990s. The specific franchises have been changing (Starbucks does date to the early 1970s, but really boomed during the 1990s, Target is similar, most of your other examples are post-2010). I recall complaints of travelling, often well outside the US, only to be faced with the same mix of stores, restaurants, brands, and products one would find within a typical US city or suburb, already by the 1990s.
I'm not saying that this isn't bad. Just that it's been going on for a long time.
