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March 27, 2024

Novel Lives

Book Publicity, Book Reviews, And Author Interviews

On The Road Again! Top Five Books With A Road Trip I Want To Or Have Read

Top 5 Books With A Road Trip I Want to Read

From Devouring Books (Linked In Title Above):

This Top 5 series started back in October and I kind of lost motivation for making it every week. But it’s back! This is a series of books that I want to read that all have a common theme. Previously on the blog I have focused on witches, werewolves, thrillers, faeries, fairy tale retellings and high fantasy. I am going to try and bring this series back for every Saturday. 

The upcoming schedule is:

8/24/19 — Books about Dragons

8/31/19 — Books with a Road Trip

9/7/19 — Summer Reads 

**I have to skip this one do to a blog/book tour schedule stop 

9/14/19 — Set in Space

9/21/19 — Over 500 Pages 

9/28/19 — Books with Maps

Rules!

  • Share your top 5 books of the current topic– these can be books that you want to read, have read and loved, have read and hated, you can do it any way you want.
  • Tag the original post (This one!)
  • Tag 5 people-  Anyone can join– which they have been so yay!

Truth is I should write my own book on this topic. I’ve criss-crossed this country myself, more times than I care to count. But I’ll give you some of the highlights, eh

  • With wasted people. No seriously. Like professionally wasted people. VERY WASTED PEOPLE. Very wasted people who seem insistent that I get my ass kicked while trying to get directions.
  • With wasted people trying to catch international flights after being on a tour bus all night.
  • With a cat. With multiple cats. With more cats than tires. -_-
  • Being chased by the biggest motherforking tornado I’ve ever seen. Ok. The first and only tornado I’ve ever actually seen. I never new a prius could go 100 miles an hour. I slowed down just long enough to snap a picture, post it and tell everyone to let my mother know I loved her, slammed the gas pedal and figured if the cops wanted me they could arrest me when I crossed the state line from Nebraska into Colorado.
  • In an overnight blizzard driving from Aspen to Denver. Gomez and Aspen. Thinking of Gomez playing in Aspen will forever make my eye twitch.
  • Having an axle break on a yellow Valari going 70 miles an hour on the Jersey Turnpike and being picked up by the litter truck.
  • Accidentally killing a HUMONGOUS large bird of some entity between Iowa and Utah. I can’t even tell you how, why, what or when. My niece peeled me off my brother’s front lawn (which I was kissing after another sordid story) and asked why there were enough guts and feathers on one corner of my prius to bring out the World WildLife Organization.  -_- I didn’t see her again till she was 18.

And when I tell you that quite seriously- this is just scratching the surface of the largest iceberg ever? It really is. You can say a lot of things about me but and I can say a lot of things about me. But I have had some experiences. LOL

So I know roadtrips. And they know me. The key is to have an idea of where you are going but to not have a plan…

In no particular order…

  1. The Fifth Season by N.K.Jemisin

Don’t even look at me with a face that your mother would tell you would stay like that if you kept making it. Not while I’m still side-eyeing TNT about where in the bat shit craze world my pre-dinosaur long ago world promised TV adaption of The Fifth Season is. Don’t argue with me.
There is a trip. And there is Earth. What is Earth anyway? And so what if it doesn’t behave according to the fundamental attributes of physics. It is still Earth. And screw cars. Who needs a car to go on a road trip. And what are roads anyway? In New York Roads and lanes are just guidelines, suggestions, if you will. People use them or don’t at any given minute. It certainly makes you consider your carbon footprint. So yeah. The Fifth Season. I’m dying on this hill.
The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth, #1)

Released: August 2014

Publisher: Orbit

Synopsis:

This is the way the world ends. Again.
Three terrible things happen in a single day. Essun, a woman living an ordinary life in a small town, comes home to find that her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter. Meanwhile, mighty Sanze — the world-spanning empire whose innovations have been civilization’s bedrock for a thousand years — collapses as most of its citizens are murdered to serve a madman’s vengeance. And worst of all, across the heart of the vast continent known as the Stillness, a great red rift has been been torn into the heart of the earth, spewing ash enough to darken the sky for years. Or centuries.
Now Essun must pursue the wreckage of her family through a deadly, dying land. Without sunlight, clean water, or arable land, and with limited stockpiles of supplies, there will be war all across the Stillness: a battle royale of nations not for power or territory, but simply for the basic resources necessary to get through the long dark night. Essun does not care if the world falls apart around her. She’ll break it herself, if she must, to save her daughter.

2) The Stand by Stephen King

I don’t think this really needs explaining. Does it? I mean there are multiple roadtrips. At multiple times.
Cool? Cool.

The Stand

Released: May 1990

Publisher: DoubleDay Books

Synopsis :

This is the way the world ends: with a nanosecond of computer error in a Defense Department laboratory and a million casual contacts that form the links in a chain letter of death. And here is the bleak new world of the day after: a world stripped of its institutions and emptied of 99 percent of its people. A world in which a handful of panicky survivors choose sides — or are chosen.

Hey wait a minute! The first sentence of the summary for The Stand and The Fifth Season are exactly the same and that scares every last piece of sanity I have right out of me!

broke me too far GIF

3) Wanderers by Chuck Wendig

There’s a road. And it promises to be a trip.
This book should have been apart of the Summer Fling. I’m not sure what happened there but it was a HUGE oversight on my part.  It is on order at the library. I’m correcting that mistake.
book review sites

Release Date: February 26, 2019
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Synopsis:
A decadent rock star. A deeply religious radio host. A disgraced scientist. And a teenage girl who may be the world’s last hope. In the tradition of The Stand and Station Eleven comes a gripping saga that weaves an epic tapestry of humanity into an astonishing tale of survival.
Shana wakes up one morning to discover her little sister in the grip of a strange malady. She appears to be sleepwalking. She cannot talk and cannot be woken up. And she is heading with inexorable determination to a destination that only she knows. But Shana and are sister are not alone. Soon they are joined by a flock of sleepwalkers from across America, on the same mysterious journey. And like Shana, there are other “shepherds” who follow the flock to protect their friends and family on the long dark road ahead.
For on their journey, they will discover an America convulsed with terror and violence, where this apocalyptic epidemic proves less dangerous than the fear of it. As the rest of society collapses all around them–and an ultraviolent militia threatens to exterminate them–the fate of the sleepwalkers depends on unraveling the mystery behind the epidemic. The terrifying secret will either tear the nation apart–or bring the survivors together to remake a shattered world.

4) Dread Nation (Dread Nation #1) by Justina Ireland  and bonus points because: Deathless Divide (Dread Nation #2)

Add Deathless Divide to your Goodreads Shelf (link above)

Go ahead. Start with me again. Just don’t. Jane has a damn scythe in her hand. A damn bloody scythe from killing damn zombies from the civil fucking war. And there is so much damn traveling in this book via all the damn ways that my feet and ass and everything hurt.
And I ached for her. I ached for everything this country did wrong and all the ways I’ve benefited from it. And I cheered for Jane. I wanted to fight with Jane. Hell I’d told her to go have a shopping spree and I’d fight for her. In the, end I wanted her to kill all of them. Living and dead. KILL. THEM. ALL. So. Yeah.
Dread Nation (Dread Nation, #1)
Deathless Divide (Dread Nation, #2)

Release Date: December 2018
Publisher: Crown Books
Synopsis:
Jane McKeene was born two days before the dead began to walk the battlefields of Gettysburg and Chancellorsville—derailing the War Between the States and changing America forever. In this new nation, safety for all depends on the work of a few, and laws like the Native and Negro Reeducation Act require certain children attend combat schools to learn to put down the dead. But there are also opportunities—and Jane is studying to become an Attendant, trained in both weaponry and etiquette to protect the well-to-do. It’s a chance for a better life for Negro girls like Jane. After all, not even being the daughter of a wealthy white Southern woman could save her from society’s expectations.
But that’s not a life Jane wants. Almost finished with her education at Miss Preston’s School of Combat in Baltimore, Jane is set on returning to her Kentucky home and doesn’t pay much mind to the politics of the eastern cities, with their talk of returning America to the glory of its days before the dead rose. But when families around Baltimore County begin to go missing, Jane is caught in the middle of a conspiracy, one that finds her in a desperate fight for her life against some powerful enemies. And the restless dead, it would seem, are the least of her problems.

5) The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman
With the turn of fall comes a new season of the Walking Dead. And what poor sorry bunch of slobs have been on the road longer than these fools? And any reason to look back fondly on the first trailer dropped at that first comic con way back when? Oh sure… why not…

Disclaimer… I didn’t start watching The Walking Dead till my mom force fed me some three or four seasons of it after I had multiple surgeries. I then gobbled up the comics. 

Let’s Chat!

 What did you think?

What are your favorite books with road trips that you would have on this list?

What books with road trips are you looking forward to reading?

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