Whether it’s across the country or up and down a coast, a road trip is a journey in more than just the literal sense. As John Steinbeck says in Travels With Charley: The Search for America, “We do not take a trip; a trip takes us.” This seems all the more true while driving on the open road with the local radio station blasting, a camera–- preferably a Super 8 or the soon-to-be-extinct Polaroid–– on hand, and a partner in crime in the passenger's seat. This summer, however, may not be the year to take this trip. With astronomically high gas prices, you could probably rent a villa in the south of France for the cost of filling your tank.

That said, psychoPEDIA put together a list of books that will put you in a road trip state of mind without having to actually go anywhere, or inspire you to go for it anyway. There are the obvious classics: On the Road by Jack Kerouac, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, and Motorcycle Diaries by Che Guevara. Or you can take the ironically un-literary advice from, the bookseller at Three Lives and Company, who says, “You can always skip the books and watch that great Tom Green movie, Roadtrip.”

“Then we came to the end of another dull and lurid year”: The first line of Don DeLillo’s Americana may just be one of the best opening sentences in modern fiction. What follows is the story of a television executive, David Bell, who leaves his job to embark on a road trip with a camera to make an autobiographical movie. "It's about the wild and flamboyant disintegration of a young man, and his partial redemption–- an ambitious recollection of a confused life; the narrator is evidently telling his own story to himself in a kind of exile on a Mediterranean island,” wrote fellow writer Joyce Carol Oates in 2003. Americana was DeLillo’s first novel, published in 1971, when the author was 28 (he later revised the book in 1989). The book explores “ a number of preoccupations of American writers, especially young writers,” says Oates, including the pilgrimage to find the self, which takes the form of a road trip.

Colin Thubron has been called the greatest living travel writer. In his ninth book, Shadow of a Silk Road, the British author chronicles a 7,000-mile journey he took in 2003 and 2004 from Yian, China to the coastal Turkish city of Antioch. Thuborn traveled routes dating back from 1500 BC by local bus, truck, car, donkey cart, and camel. The book “maps out a picture of the network of ancient trade routes that linked the Greco-Roman world with central Asia and Chine and the history of those routes,” The Guardian wrote at the time of publication in 2007. The author notoriously travels without a camera making the tone of his written memories poetic and elegant. And hilarious at times-- as with his account of an emergency root canal procedure with a Chador-wearing dentist. “We should be thankful for a fresh look at the remnants of an intricate economy that once knitted together a large part of the world,” The Guardian concluded.

Travels with Charley: In Search of America, is an autobiographical road trip memoir of John Steinbeck. In 1960, the author bought a pick-up truck, named Rocinante (and on view in the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California), had it modified with a custom built camper-top, rare for that time, and drove across the country, from his home in Sag Harbor with his poodle Charley. The two followed the eastern seaboard to Florida and then the West Coast and California hoping to try and “rediscover this monster land.” Steinbeck muses on the natural world and observes the people he meets, “The techniques of opening conversation are universal. He was 58 at the time, dying eight years later at 66. The writer never wrote an autobiography, but gave himself the map of America and the confinement of his camper to muse upon his life: “And how about the areas of regret? If only I had done so-and-so, or had not said such-and-such may go, the damn thing might not have happened. Finding this potential in my own mind, I can suspect it in others, but I will never know, for no one ever tells. And this is why, on my journey which was designed for observation, I stayed as much as possible on secondary roads where there was much to see and hear and smell, and avoided the great wide traffic slashes which promote the self by fostering daydreams.” And you thought a road trip was all about staring out the window.

~Sara Costello