The 10 best homeland travel books

So many people like this time of year because the heat and humidity, the long, languorous evenings -- gin and tonic, anyone? --the whole school's-out mentality seems to justify their tastes in books, which they can neatly place under the rubric of "beach reading" even though you know they devour the same portly thrillers and powdery romance novels when they're nowhere near any sand.

Since most people have to travel to the beach (or mountains or national park or casino resort), it's always seemed to me that travel books would make for much better summer reading.

This year, Americans are taking to the highways in especially large numbers. So naturally they want something good to read after a long day of driving. Preferably something that illuminates the land they're moving through.

So I've come up with a list of my favorite travel books about the United States, many of them, interestingly, accounts of road trips.

If the best travel books are about foreign lands -- as Jim Benning recently suggested on www.worldhum.com -- the best road books are about the United States. I limited my time frame to the last 100 years, so, unfortunately, no Tocqueville or Twain. But feel free to pack them in your own beach bag.

10. "Travels With Charley," by John Steinbeck. Despite its endearing title, this book is really about a trip around the author's head as he drives his poodle around the country. But it is one of two homegrown travel books that practically every American has at least heard of.

9. "The American Scene," by Henry James. Returning home at the turn of the century after a 20-year absence, the great master travels down the Eastern seaboard, from New England to Florida, finding "the triumph of superficiality and the apotheosis of the raw."

8. "The Air-Conditioned Nightmare," by Henry Miller. A very different writer at a very different time (World War II) comes back home and is no more encouraged than the other Henry was four decades earlier. Driving from New York to California, the author of Tropic of Cancer complains that his compatriots' obsession with money has undermined their pursuit of pleasure (a subject he knew a little about).

7. "Blue Highways," by William Least Heat-Moon. A comprehensive reminder of the characters, and character, still to be found off the Interstates.

6. "Old Glory," by Jonathan Raban. An Englishman who grew up reading Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn tries nobly, and humorously, to understand the country by sailing down the Mississippi River.

5. "Coast to Coast," by Jan Morris. The doyenne of travel essayists journeys through the United States in the early '50s, "at the very apex," as she has called it in retrospect, "of American happiness."

4. "Liebling at Home," by A.J. Liebling. This collection by the great New Yorker writer contains classic pieces with perfect titles ("The Honest Rainmaker," "The Telephone Booth Indian") and the best nonfiction writing ever done on Chicago and Louisiana.

3. "Lolita," by Vladimir Nabokov. Only people who've never read this novel think it's about sex with a minor. Everyone else knows that it's the sublimely told story of the seduction of a donnish European by the nymphetish New World. And at its heart is a spot-on evocation of roadside America, where even some of our natural attractions are turned into kitsch which, in the hands of a transplanted Russian genius, is transformed into art.

2. "Hunting Mister Heartbreak," by Jonathan Raban. Residing briefly in Manhattan, Key West and Alabama before finally settling down in Seattle, the author of Old Glory here captures not only diverse regions of the country but also our national quality of restlessness.

1. "On the Road," by Jack Kerouac. Our other famous travel book (and immeasurably greater than the one with the dog riding shotgun), it has transcended its Beat beginnings to become a timeless ode to carpe-diem, foot-on-the-accelerator, it's-all-fascinating America.