Around the Year in 52 Books discussion

By plane, train, or automobile... This week, you're looking for routes of travel on the cover of a novel. How you define "route of travel" is up to you, but you're typically going to be keeping an eye out for roads, bridges, paths, and other ways you may travel.

Some Examples:


ATY Listopia: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1...

What are you reading for this prompt? What type of route did you look for?

I like bridges so I used the card catalog and typed in bridge for title and decided to read: The Other Side of the Bridge

Sunny wrote: "I like bridges so I used the card catalog and typed in bridge for title and decided to read: The Other Side of the Bridge"

@Sunny - have you read The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer? If you at all like WWII stories, especially ones told from locations that are not the usual suspects, you might like this. It has 'bridge' in the title AND on the cover.

This book has been on my list every year I think so maybe 2023 will be the year I finally read On the Road by Jack Kerouac! My Penguin edition has a cover with a comic book look. Three of the panels have a road in them.

I'm going to read The Bridge over the Drina. It's completely new to me - I chose it because I wanted to find a book set around the former Yugoslavia- but it looks interesting, with stories over four centuries of life on and around the bridge. It would work as well for 'body of water in the title' and if you wanted a multi-century book for the 'three centuries' prompts.

I haven't read Underground Railroad, On the Road, or Lincoln Highway yet.

This Wild, Wild Country by Inga Vesper is calling to me. It sounds different from everything else I'm reading. It might also fit Western.

Title includes route of travel:
The Road to Yesterday - L.M. Montgomery
Dust Tracks On A Road - Zora Neale Hurston
New Grub Street - George Gissing
Cloudstreet - Tim Winton
Halsey Street- Naima Coster

Route of travel on cover

I'm planning to read The Road by Cormac McCarthy

I’m thinking about
,
which has a subway map, or

where the truck is at the end of a dirt road, I think.

and are both great choices… the stories fit the concept as well as the covers do!

The Map of Time by Felix J. Palma. I chose this because you need a map for directions to get you to where you want to go.

For this I will pick from the foillowing:

I'm probably choosing between these three:

Toward the Setting Sun: Pioneer Girls Traveling the Overland Trails by Mary Barnmeyer O'Brien
The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman by Nancy Marie Brown
Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey by Lillian Schlissel

I'll choose one between these:

Long Bright River by Liz Moore
Gulliver's Travels: Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. by Jonathan Swift
Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah
Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne
Birdcage Walk by Helen Dunmore
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

For this prompt, I read:

Search by Michelle Huneven - 5* - My Review

I read The Book of Etta. The cover shows a road leading toward St. Louis (STL or Estiel in the book.)

I highly recommend Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke. It's a modern-day mystery thriller based in the American South. So great!



I'm hoping to read
by the way.

Oh I definitely misunderstood this prompt when I first read it and I chose a book that had a boat on it because I was thinking mode of transportation.
The boat is on water and you can travel by water so I think it still works so I'm going to keep it for now but I feel kind of silly lol

This sounds weird, but I'm not great at deciphering covers. Can I get people's opinion on whether How to Sell a Haunted House would count? Is that a pathway up to the house? Or a sidewalk behind the house?

Alicia wrote: "This sounds weird, but I'm not great at deciphering covers. Can I get people's opinion on whether How to Sell a Haunted House would count? Is that a pathway up to the house? Or a si..."

It looks like maybe a beachfront behind the house? There's not really a path up to the house. It looks like it's just the light shining on the lawn with no actual path.

Yeah, I think I just have to use it for another prompt. If only there was one about creepy dolls.

I used That is an underground train stop.

I've read Dog on It for this one. Dirt road seen from the car driving on it.

For this one I read Enrique's Journey… a nonfiction account of an Honduran teenager trying to get to his mother in the United States.

I read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader I am loving the re-read of this series

I read The Sorority Murder. The route isn't long but its there so I decided it worked for me mostly because I wanted to finally read this book.

Used House at the End of the Street by Lily Blake for this one. Quick and okay read for what it was, though there is a plot snafu near the end.

I read A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson.

I read Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. I thought it was the perfect book to use for this prompt, because the title is also the central metaphor of the story: that aliens have stopped by earth and left mysterious objects behind, like humans stopping by the side of the road to have a picnic and leaving their trash when they go.

I am currently reading Pineapple Street - I think it works well for this prompt.

I have read Jinnie by Josephine Cox. The cover has a barge on a canal. I chose it because I had it on my shelf to read.

The Women Could Fly - 5 stars

For this I read The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles,

I read The Bridge over the Drina by Ivo Andrić.

A beautiful bridge is built near a small town in Bosnia in the sixteenth century. The book is a series of vignettes of life in the town and on the bridge through the centuries to 1914 and the outbreak of war. I was totally absorbed in the life of the town and the relationships between the townspeople, Muslim, Christian and Jewish, mostly living well together but with the seeds of future bloodshed present. The author won the Nobel Prize for this book - well deserved.

I would recommend: The Salt Path.

I read The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches with a road on the cover


I love the Salt Path suggestion!!!


edited--- oops, moved that to another week!

What are you reading for this prompt?
I read The Body in the Road by Moray Dalton


What type of route did you look for? A route in the title.

Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia

I read Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy. 5 stars

I read Firefly Lane - Kristin Hannah

For a bit of a second time around, I read . It was interesting to find how isolated these islands can be, even thought they are only 20 miles from mainland England, and view themselves as Cornish.

I read

The Devil’s Highway – Luis Alberto Urrea – 5*****
In May 2001, twenty-six men tried to cross into the USA from Mexico along a stretch of desert known as “The Devil’s Highway.” Only twelve made it out alive. This was a horrifying episode and Urrea’s reporting of it in this book earned a nomination for a Pullitzer. He handles the details of the journey with competing emotions: hope, outrage, compassion, frustration, despair. He is honest about what happened and fair when reporting both the positions of “The 26” and of the Border Patrol agents.
LINK to my full review

I read Slouching TOWARDS Los Angeles: Living and Writing By Joan Didion's Light edited by Steffie Nelson

I read The Man from Primrose Lane by James Renner. The story was so promising until Part III, when it quickly nosedived into head-scratching territory. No complaints about the writing - it's the plot that goes off the rails. One minute it's a hard boiled-detective novel, the next, a sci-fi time travel mishmash that gets weirder and more confusing as it goes on. Like an all too winding lane.

I read
The Road - round 1
The Guise of Another - round 2

Also
Housekeeping

I read the Kindle version of Us Against You by Fredrik Backman (Beartown #2). It did not disappoint. Backman had me cry (a little bit, not a full bawl - that was later) by page 8, and then chuckling by page 9.


if it's hard for you to see, this cover features a snowy road/path with footprints on it

So many choices! But I finally decided to take the challenge very literally and read a book about a travel- Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America.