The case for and against English textbooks

Based on the plans that I was writing out yesterday for the next quarter (yes, I know that this doesn’t make me an “innovative educator,” but I tend to plan the elements of my course in advance), I realized that I can come in to work on Monday and tell my advanced class that they can bring in their textbooks and sign them back in.

Sounds kind of a mundane set of instructions, right?  But let’s keep in mind that it’s the end of January.  We are barely into the second semester of the school year and the “bring in your textbooks and sign them back in” announcement is what you often hear in May.  But as I have been sketching out plans for the third and fourth quarters, I’ve noticed that I’m simply not going to need the English textbook for the remainder of the year.  So why have it at home?

English textbooks have always perplexed me.  While I know I shouldn’t make the mistake of comparing my current students’ experience with my own, I can’t help but think back and remember what I actually did in my own high school English classes.  Now, I’d had “reading books” when I was in elementary school–in fact, I wrote a whole post about them on my other blog back in 2011–and they had vocabulary and grammar worksheets that went along with them, and I remember actually having an “English” text in junior high, but I don’t remember using it for more than grammar exercises.  When I got to high school, though, there wasn’t a set of textbooks that I remember filling out forms for every year, unless you counted the Sadlier-Oxford vocabulary books we used from ninth to eleventh grade.

No, English when I was in high school was simply novels and plays, starting with Great Expectations with Mr. Valenti freshman year and ending with Ordinary People senior year (which may or may not be true.  I remember that Great Expectations was the very first book I read in high school, but my mind’s cloudy on the last one).  My teachers would hand out the book along with the Sayville High School “book loan card” that we filled out and were kept on file, and we’d be told that we had to read part of the book or the entire book by a certain date.

That’s kind of how I work things with my advanced sophomores.  I give out a copy of whatever we’re reading as well as a schedule of when we’re discussing what (as much as I can, anyway) and reiterate my expectation that they come to class prepared each day.   Most of the material, however, isn’t from our textbook and instead comes via individual copies of novels or plays, or things I have found in various anthologies or from websites that I have photocopied.  The textbook does come into play for a random poem or story here and there, and all of my sophomores read Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, which can be found there, but beyond that I have to ask: why is the book there?

Okay, I know why it’s there or at least how it got there.  Years before I started teaching at my current high school, there was a textbook adoption process and whomever was in charge at the time chose the McDougal Littel text, with all of its ancillary exercise books and test prep materials.  In another district I once taught in, the winning company was Pearson-Prentice Hall.  And while those ancillary exercise books have been great for stuff like sub work, I can’t say that it would make a difference in my work.

So do we even need textbooks in English class?

As the “Twilight” Fades …

photo credit: osiatynska via photopin cc

A student and I were talking in study hall the other day about some of the books that she reads, and she pointed out that she was reading the latest in a YA series, but followed that up with “because I read the other three, so I have to read this one.”  The conversation then turned to some of the YA books that have come out over the last decade or two that have staying power.  Right away, we both seemed to agree that the Harry Potter books fit well within that category, even though I have never read a single page of any of them (and to her credit, she didn’t recoil in horror as if I just punted her baby 30 yards because I’ve never read them.  I simply haven’t.  They came out at a time when I wasn’t interested in them, so I never read them.); and we tenuously agreed on whether or not The Hunger Games will be on teens’ hit lists in 2022 (we both agreed the first novel has the best shot).

Then we turned our attention to Twilight.

Okay, I brought it up because I knew she’d laugh because she knows my utter disdain for Stephenie Meyer’s sparkle sparkle vampire saga.  But I can’t help it because those novels are such an easy target.  After all, they have been incredibly popular during the past decade, and the quality of writing is suspect at best.  When I wrote for Change.org in 2009 about the “Twilight” of serious teen reading (which I’m pretty sure was their title, not mine, but whatevs), I was writing in regard to a columnist’s whining about how the big-name authors of his day are largely ignored by today’s teens in favor of what’s essentially popcorn.  The gripe is legitimate in a sense, although it’s not exactly a new one since our culture has been debating the merits of pop versus substance since Elvis first appeared on the scene and Annette and Frankie were making movies about going to the beach.

What has struck me as interesting during the time since I wrote that blog post is how many teachers seem to not only love the popcorn, but are buying and feeding their students the popcorn as well.  Don’t get me wrong, I read my fair share of it and am always up for talking about it.  But there seem to be so many teachers out there who are so focused on not having their classes be the derided “boring English class” that they have swung the pendulum completely to the other side and are eschewing most, if not all of the classics for stuff that’s engaging or is going to “work” in their classrooms.

The “Twilight” of Serious Teen Reading

photo credit: visual.dichotomy via photopin cc

[A quick note:  This post originally appeared on Change.org on March 13, 2009.  I'm reposting it here with some minor edits]

In the Washington Post, Ron Charles wonders aloud what has become of the radical youth because college students of today, instead of reading seminal counterculture works by Jack Kerouac, Abbie Hoffman, and Anais Nin,  are reading Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series.  Apparently, the idea that the younger generation rebel against the older generation, rise up and challenge the status quo was smothered to death in a cul-de-sac somewhere in the last 30 years (“On Campus, Vampires are Besting the Beats“):

Here we have a generation of young adults away from home for the first time, free to enjoy the most experimental period of their lives, yet they’re choosing books like 13-year-old girls — or their parents. The only specter haunting the groves of American academe seems to be suburban contentment.

Where are the Germaine Greers, the Jerry Rubins, the Hunter Thompsons, the Richard Brautigans — those challenging, annoying, offensive, sometimes silly, always polemic authors whom young people used to adore to their parents’ dismay?

He goes on to lament that college campuses don’t seem to be what they were 40 years ago when his generation was stirring up trouble in protest for equal rights or against the Vietnam War (in fact, he mentions that a tour guide at Kent State University doesn’t mention the infamously fatal 1970 riot on his tour), and that the average college student has become more conservative in some ways, but simply less active in others.  Even though he does admit that the way today’s youth participates in politics isn’t the same way their parents or grandparents did, he doesn’t seem to approve:

“As young people shift toward the Internet and away from exploring their political activism in books, the blood drains from their shelves. For the Twitter generation, the new slogan seems to be ‘Don’t trust anyone over 140 characters.’ What you see at the next revolution is far more likely to be a well-designed Web site than a radical novel or a poem. Not to be a drag, but that’s so uncool. For those of us who care about literature and think it still has a lot to offer, it’s time to start chanting, ‘Hell, no! We won’t go!’”

I’ve read this article three times now, plus what people have written in the Post’s comments sections (well, except for those beating the “liberals are destroying learning … all college is radical … teachers are communists … and what do we do with witches?  BURN THEM!” drum, which … *yawn*.  Wake me up when you come off it) and I’m still vacillating between two thoughts:  yes, we’re all doomed, because sometimes I’m amazed that my students read at all; and no, you’re just another whining boomer that I had to hear from when I was in high school in the ’90s and you people were calling everyone between 15-30 a “slacker.”  While I honestly admit that I didn’t really like On the Road, I took enough writing classes in college to be around people who had read and workshipped Jack Kerouac – and discontent coming from a kid at a private Catholic college whose biggest problem is telling mom and dad that he ran up the Visa buying clothes from J. Crew doesn’t exactly come off as genuine (I won’t go into the Sylvia Plath desciples, who I’m sure had already preheated the ovens in their dorms.)

Who Wrote Holden Caulfield?

“It’s so punk rock.”

This, coming from me, is one of the most hilarious things because while I love punk music I have always been the furthest thing from “punk.” Now, my friend Chris, whom I’ve known since we were four and teaches freshman English on Long Island? He knows punk. Me? I learned to play the piano so I could play Billy Joel songs.

So like I said, the word “punk” coming from me–a bald, slightly overweight, 35-year-old English teacher–seems more hilarious than anything, even though in my mind it’s true because I was describing one of my favorite novels of all time, The Catcher in the Rye.

[My friend Laura, who hates J.D. Salinger, just slammed her head into her keyboard]

I had been talking about banned books week in class the other day and brought up the many times the book has been challenged or removed over the years because of its language or themes (one of my favorites was a district in Texas that preemptively removed the look because they just didn’t want to idea with it), and gave a quick overview of it, saying that in many ways it is the original modern day teen rebellion story. Sure, Holden Caulfield is a whiny rich prep school kid, and this takes place in the early 1950s so it doesn’t have anything to do with 21st Century Skills, but as I have positive before, when there are so many tropes in literature and popular culture, it helps to explore where they come from.

Unfortunately, I don’t get to explore it too much more than recommending it to my students because it’s on the eleventh grade and not the tenth grade curriculum. And I have to admit that I’m a little peeved by that because I know that if I had the chance, I would teach the shit out of that book. the most I have ever been able to do with it is read it about six times and discuss it here and there with former students.

If I did get to teach The Catcher in the Rye, I’d probably start with the statement that began this post. I know that Salinger’s novel is a little more suited to the jazz of the time, but i spent my formative years feasting on John Hughes movies and ’90s alternative, metal, and punk music (well, when I wasn’t playing selections from The Stranger), so as I read the book, I can hear The Ramones, The Replacements, Green Day … which aren’t all 1990s but you know what I’m getting at. In other words, it would be kind of the culmination of what is a running joke between me and a couple of my students–I connect every piece of literature to movies or music.

But in a way, that’s what makes literature like this survive, the fact that there is no adaptation helps The Catcher in the Rye more than any other “watch the movie” exercise could. There’s no set visual or audio to accompany it means the novel’s open to a certain amount of interpretation and even though Salinger would be pissed at my saying it, that kind of makes Holden belong to the reader. Sure, he wrote the words but our getting into his head and then putting him into our is what makes him just as relevant as any of the copies–from Jim Start to John Bender–that he inspired.

Watch your f—in’ language

It’s banned books week!  I love banned books week!

No, seriously, I do, and I think it’s because when I look at the ALA’s list of “Banned and Challenged Classics,” I see a number of books that I either read for English class or that are taught by me or a colleague.  And just because I love pumping my own ego here, I’ll run off a quick list:

• The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (read it in high school; taught in 11th grade)
• The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger (read it in high school; taught in 11th grade)
• The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck (was taught in honors 11 in my h.s.; I read it a few years ago)
• To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee (read it in high school; taught in 9th grade)
• The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding  (read it in high school; taught in 12th grade)
• 1984, by George Orwell (read it in college; taught in 12th grade)
• Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck  (read it in high school; taught in 11th grade)
• Catch-22, by Joseph Heller (taught in the AP course of the first school where I taught)
• Animal Farm, by George Orwell  (read it in high school; taught in 12th grade)
• Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston (on 11th grade curriculum of school where I first taught)
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey (read it in high school)
• The Call of the Wild, by Jack London (read it in 7th grade)
• The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien (while not on the curriculum, popular among my students)
• The Awakening, by Kate Chopin (on AP curriculum of school where I first taught; however, the department was forced to put a sticker over the cover of the Penguin edition because it featured an impressionist’s painting of a half-naked woman)
• The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie (not taught, but a copy was in my high school library)
•  A Separate Peace, by John Knowles (read in 11th grade)

That’s quite a bit (there were 97 books total on the list), and that doesn’t count a few others that I read in college or that may be on other school districts’ reading lists.  A quick search of the “Why they were challenged/banned” page shows that the word “violence” shows up 11 times, “language” shows up 43 times, and “sex” shows up 62 times.  I’d say I find this surprising or not even interesting, but it’s not–our culture has this weird, almost puritanical objecting to sex and language yet allows violence that makes the Tom & Jerry cartoons I watched as a kid look tame.

I tell my students three things about literature that we often call “classic.”  First, that there is a reason it’s called “classic” and is still taught even though it may be hundreds (even thousands) of years old and that’s because the insights those writers had into human nature are still applicable today.  Second, literature does not happen in a vacuum–it affects the world and the world has an effect on it.  Third, all great literature usually contains one or both of two things:  sex and death.

2011-2012 Summer Reading Project: On the Road

When I sat down sometime last year with my copy of Blue Highways and decided that I was going to begin a reading project that would be all about traveling (in one way or another), I knew I was going to save one particular book for the end, and that was On The Road.

Anyone who actually knows me probably won’t be surprised that I had never read Jack Kerouac’s seminal novel, and also won’t be surprised to hear me say that I wouldn’t have ever read it had I not committed to reading it for this self-imposed project.  Not having read it was probably also reason enough to turn in my “English teacher card”; after all, isn’t On The Road up there with The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, Beowulf, and the works of William Shakespeare in the canon of Books Every English Teacher Has Read and Memorized?

But not to worry, I remedied that issue by going to my local public library and checking it out (I could have downloaded it to my Kindle, which would be much more “21st Century Skills,” but the library is free), then set out to read it while I was on vacation in Virginia Beach for a few days.  I was looking forward to it because I was checking a “vital” book off of my list, I was reading another book wherein people traveled, and I was finally going to see what the big deal is.

I barely got through it.

Now don’t get me wrong, I see what the big deal is about On The Road.  It encapsulates the spirit of the Beats and has the feel of the consummate free spirit; it’s one of the most important works for a creative non-conformist to read and know.  But it’s a complete train wreck.  There’s not much of a plot, and the point seems to be that there isn’t really a point.  Which I get, and that’s not my problem with the novel (and shouldn’t be–how many movies do I like where there really is no point or plot?).  The problem is that it’s not a very likable book.

Kerouac’s narrator is Sal Paradise, who clearly is supposed to be himself, and he chronicles a few years’ worth of traveling back and forth across the country as well his encounters with several people, many of whom are stand-ins for important Beat writers.  Sal, as a narrator, is a Nick Carroway to the Jay Gatsby that is Dean Moriarity (IRL Neal Cassaday), a free-wheeling guy who has women on each coast and seems to be all about throwing caution to the wind.  Much like Gatsby, Dean is completely full of shit and we as an audience can see right through him, whereas our narrator cannot.  Unlike Nick, Sal isn’t very likable.  He doesn’t seem to have the voice of a common observer or make any effort to ground us in any sort of reality.  And seriously, he’s a schmuck.  So, by the time I got to the point where he realized that Dean was full of shit, I simply didn’t give a shit.

That’s probably pretty harsh and maybe my evaluation of this book has less to do with its quality and more to do with my being the wrong age and having the wrong mindset for this sort of thing–more mindset than age, because I never had such a pointless view of things.  Thankfully, I’m not ending the reading project with this book.  There’s two more entries left and one more book to read.

2011-2012 Summer Reading Project: The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life

When I got my Kindle about a year and a half ago, it wasn’t long before I went about looking for stuff to add to it that wouldn’t cost me much or anything at all.  Amazon’s free Kindle store was my first stop, and I’ve managed to find a few classics among the self-help and tacky-looking erotica. My second stop was Project Gutenberg, the open source library that features books mostly available in the public domain.  I was less successful with what I found there–mostly old poetry collections and the occasional novel–but I did come across Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life.  It wasn’t very long and I figured that since I was in the middle of reading a couple of books that were about traveling through that part of the country (in fact, I think I was in the middle of Cross-Country when I downloaded it), I decided that this would fit in nicely with my little project here (which, after this particular post, has only two books left).

The book documents two months in 1846 which Parkman spent on the Oregon Trail, which was the famous 2,300 migration route from Independence, Missouri to Oregon City, Oregon that thrived through much of the 19th Century.  He goes west with a hunting expedition and spends much of the time during this expedition hunting buffalo with a band of Ogala Sioux.  And … that’s pretty much it, really.  It’s less of a journey and more of what he says the book is in its subtitle: sketches of prairie life.

Parkman is pretty descriptive, especially in his detail about the hunting of the buffalo and the relationships his party has with the Indians.  He even seems to make the people in his hunting expedition seem like they are characters in a novel, giving the book a little more narrative flair than letting it simply be a recollection of experiences he had along the trail.  However, I have to say that I didn’t find it very engaging and by the time the last half of the book was rolling around I was more committed to finishing it than reading it.  I did, however, walk away with three things …

2011-2012 Summer Reading Project: The Great American Road Trip — U.S. 1 from Maine to Florida

So with all of the virtual road trips I’ve taken by reading these books, one of the things I have found the most fun has been seeing how these writers get to meet people in addition to visiting places over the course of their journies. Each of them takes the time to describe those they talk to and capture their personalities, even if they do not necessarily agree with their political views. They are attempts to capture America at that specific time, to give the reader a full portrait of the country and to show a common thread (in a manner of speaking).

Peter Genovese’s The Great American Road Trip: U.S. 1 from Maine to Florida is no exception. Genovese, a journalist based in New Jersey, spent a significant amount of time (two years, I believe) traveling Route 1 from Fort Kent, Maine to Key West, Florida and chronicled his journey in the way a journalist would–observing the nature of the highway, visiting attractions and other places along the highway, and also spending a decent amount of time with people.

The result is the only “coffee table”-sized book I’ve read for this project, as he divides his travel up state by state (including the District of Columbia) and includes both black and white and color photographs of the people and places he encounters. It’s a pretty thorough trip down a highway that he admits doesn’t get a lot of recognition for being important because it’s not as noteworthy as Route 66 or Route 40 (aka “The Lincoln Highway”), even though during the course of the trip he passes through most of the major cities along the east coast. Stops include a roadside motel in Maine; The Bronx Zoo; a wax museum dedicated to African-Americans in Baltimore; the headquarters of the National Enquirer; and plenty of bars, junkyards, hubcap dealers as well.

I remember first coming across this book in the early 2000s, when I read Sarah Bunting’s two-part chronicle of her own trip down Route 1 in 1998, a trip she considered turning into a book but wound up posting on her site, Tomato Nation (“U.S. Highway One: Straight No Chaser” Part 1, Part 2). I bought my copy of Genovese’s book a few months later, and at the time, the book had been out for a couple of years, so it wasn’t easy to find, but my copy says that it had been marked down to $16.95 from whatever the cover price was, so I bought it used, but where I can’t remember (probably eBay). It currently sits among other “important books” that involve travel or places on a shelf in my living room, and even if I wasn’t rereading it, I certainly would have enjoyed flipping through it.

The end of Route 1 in Key West, Florida.

Then again, I always enjoy the idea that a person could take one highway and really experience it to its fullest like this.  I’ve also always been the type of person who wonders where the road I’m on keeps going — and no, I’m not speaking metaphorically here, I literally want to see the beginning and the end of a particular road.  Since I lived on Route 1 for a few years in my twenties (in Arlington, Virginia), I feel some sort of connection to the highway … which is what piqued my interest in a book about it.  And thankfully, there is a sort of “drama” to the beginning and end of Route 1, as it starts in specific places where you can, if you’d like, stop and savor the moment, unlike many interstate highways, which begin and end when they merge with other highways or parkways (this, by the way has always been my beef with the Northern State Parkway on Long Island.  Every other parkway ends at a state park, but the Northern State just … ends randomly.  If I were still living on Long Island, I would drive out there, find it and take a picture, but alas I am not. One day …).  Genovese does his best to convey this feeling, especially since the beginning of the road is rigth near the Canadian border and the end of the road here is pretty much at the literal end of the east coast, in Key West.  There’s no majesty to the trip, per se (after all, quite a large amount of Route 1, at least from my experience driving it in Northern Virginia, involves strip malls and fast food joints … but I do give him props for visiting the Krispy Kreme in Alexandria, which is always a stop of mine whenever I’m up there), but I think that’s what I like about it.  It’s kind of hard for an experience on a road like that to feel artificial and you do get the feeling that there is some of the “real America” that John Steinbeck and so many others were looking for when they set out on their various trips (as well as the “real America” that so many moron politicians attempt to pander to, especially in an election year).

As I mentioned, it’s not the easiest thing to get a hold of the book.  A new copy on Amazon will cost you nearly $40, but it is on Kindle for $14.99.  But if you ever find this while wandering through a used book store, pick it up.

2011-2012 Summer Reading Project: Killing Yourself to Live

If Assassination Vacation showed how premature death made at least two presidents notable (I think Lincoln could have lived to carry out his second term and been well-remembered, don’t you?), then Killing Yourself to Live is what you want to read if you want to know why some of the most famous rock and rollers are famous — for dying young.

Chuck Klosterman, whose Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs was one of my favorite books of the previous decade, spends this book on a trip around the country where he will be visiting the places where several important rock and pop artists met their untimely demises and other rock-oriented tragedies, all under the auspices of researching an article for Spin. During the summer of 2003–the same year Vowell was looking into assassinations–he visits the club in Rhode Island that was where a concert by the band Great White led to the deaths of 100 people; the intersection where Duane Allman crashed his motorcycle; the field where the plane carrying The Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens, and Buddy Holly crashed; the apartment where The Replacements’ Bob Stinson died; and the site of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, among others.

During his trip, Klosterman also writes about the trip itself, mostly about the women in his life, with whom he’s trying to reconcile or dump or maybe both at one point or another. He also writes with an easy yet intelligent style that allows his readers to shift from reflections on his relationships to topics such as a deep examination as to whether or not certain artists are famous because they died young. His ruminations on the fame of singer Jeff Buckley, for instance, are spot on, as he wonders if Buckley’s drowning at a young age inflated the critical value of his album, Grace. Now, I’ll say I am a little biased to this part because I once made this observation on a listserv and got completely taken to task for it … so it kind of felt like validation.

ANYWAY, what I love about Klosterman’s writing (I have read all of them up to and including Eating the Dinosaur, which I intend to reread at some point because I didn’t really like it and want to give it another chance) is that he assumes that his audience is smart, yet doesn’t come off as patronizing or condescending to those who might not be. He’s not a snob (at least outwardly) and is certainly not a hipster, and he works with the same sort of analytical mind that I can really relate to.

Unfortunately, as much as the subject matter of this book is great, it’s not one I would recommend to students. Scratch that. It’s not one I would teach, because I have recommended it to students in the past, but those students were already reading one of his two prior books (the aforementioned Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and Fargo Rock City). In fact, one of my students had kept it and read it for so long that she returned the dog-eared copy in a gift bag as her graduation present to me upon her graduation. Smart ass.

But for students of pop culture, it’s a must-read, and for those who like travel books it’s a nice left turn (pun intended) away from what we’re used to seeing on bookstore shelves.

2011-2012 Summer Reading Project: Travels With Charley In Search of America

I was introduced to John Steinbeck pretty early in my academic career, when I read The Red Pony in the seventh grade.  I honestly don’t remember much about that book–is that one of the ones where the pony dies but Disney made it live at the end of the movie?–but I don’t remember hating it.  Anyway, I’d encounter him two more times in junior high and high school, reading The Pearl in eighth grade and Of Mice and Men in ninth grade.  Years later, I’d become part of a book club (well, a wine club with a reading problem, really) and read East of Eden and then picked up The Grapes of Wrath about a summer later.  Those two books really put my appreciation for this great American writer on a whole new level.

Prior to my rediscovery of Steinbeck’s works via his two epic novels, however, I picked up a copy of Travels With Charley in Search of America back in 2003 and read most of it while in Paris on my honeymoon.  I really enjoyed it then and when I undertook this reading project last summer I knew that this was back on my list.  Funny thing, though–my copy seems to have disappeared from my bookshelf.  I’m pretty sure that I loaned to to a student or to my brother-in-law, but it’s a pretty easy to find book so I went to a copy of the local library and checked it out. And on an aside, Travels With Charley and a number of other Steinbeck works was actually among the “young adult” books, which I found awesome.  I pictured some unwitting teenager wandering through the stacks looking for something after making their way through The Hunger Games and Twilight and coming across Of Mice and Men, and starting on an amazing literary journey.

Anyway, back to Travels With Charley.  I think the reread of this one took me about three days, which is about the same amount of time it took the first time I read it nearly a decade ago.  If you’re unfamiliar with the book, Steinbeck decided in 1960 that he wanted to see the country way that he would be unnoticed–he’d become pretty famous as a writer by this point–so he had a pickup truck converted into a camper and named it Rocinante, after Don Quixote’s horse (the camper itself was not hard to picture, as I’d encountered many such vehicles when I worked at Robert Moses State Park during my college summers).  He began his trip by heading up to New England by way of the Orient Point Ferry (something I’m also familiar with–my parents take the Orient Point Ferry on their way to New Hampshire every year) and then eventually made his way through the midwest and into the northwest before heading to Texas and then through the deep south.  His traveling companion was a poodle named Charley, who Steinbeck gives as much attention in the book as he does the scenery and people he encounters on his trip.

The story that he tells is truly what the subtitle of the book says: he is searching for America, and in doing so he offers a snapshot of the country and its people through what he encounters, and he seems to find that there is a gentility among the average American, and he also seems to find the  same sort of congeniality that Heat-Moon does on his journey in Blue Highways.  I liked that there was a “universality” to the personality being explored in both books and how they almost echo one another.  What also makes Steinbeck’s memoir even more important than its simply being a chronicle of a trip, however, is his recollection of his time spent in the south in the final part.  Travels With Charley takes place at the height of the conflict concerning integrating schools and he has an extended conversation with both people he meets as well as the reader about the nature of this debate and racism itself.

It’s almost a historical document, in a way, and while it might not be wholly accurate (there’s a whole section on the book’s Wikipedia page regarding the book’s veracity), Steinbeck writes in a way that puts you in the truck with him and his dog and in those conversations he is having with people because while it’s not necessarily a treatise on the politics and current events of the time, Travels With Charley does offer a nice snapshot of the country and makes you think about how much has changed and how much has not.