LIT LISTS: Ten of the best road books

Mary Miller grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. Her collection of stories, Big World, was published in 2009. A graduate of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas,

she will return to Mississippi in the fall of 2014 to serve as the John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at Ole Miss. The Last Days of California is her first novel.

For Publishers Weekly Miller tagged her ten best road books, including:

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

It took me a long time to get through The Road, a post-apocalyptic journey of a father and son pushing a shopping cart south, through the deserted and charred landscape, to escape the cold. I love McCarthy’s sentences but can’t read too many of them at once. After a few pages, I simply stop understanding the meaning of words. I black out, basically. But on the sentence level—on the paragraph level—he really astounds me. This book is dark and enormously repetitive, but it’s also beautiful. An ex-boyfriend used to read this book to me at night before we went to sleep. I could follow along better when he read it, but he broke up with me around page 100 and I had to finish it on my own; it nearly broke me, which seemed exactly right.