Best Books-On-Tape for a Long Road Trip
Next time you’re taking a long road trip, stop listening to repeats of Joe Rogan; listen to a classic book-on-tape instead—we’ve three, great, road-trip recommendations to get you started: “Moby Dick,” “Around the World in Eighty Days” and Stephen King’s “The Stand.” Tweet
Highlights
If you’ve never driven coast-to-coast alone, let me tell you it can be daunting—like you are just never going to get there.
Completing my four-day, 2,500-mile trip while listening to what seemed like 80, cassette tapes...made a big chunk of the trip seem quite short.
I lucked upon a copy of Jules Verne’s “Around the World in Eighty Days” on one long haul from Southern California to the Carolinas.
If you’re old enough, you may know that back in the day, you could go into any truck stop in America, rent a book on tape for a few dollars and drop it off at just about any other truck stop further down the road when you were done with it.
There was a certain amount of serendipity to this, as your choices were always limited to what the last five or 10 drivers, who’d just passed through, had been listening to.
I used to drive a lot, and that’s how I “read” a lot of Louis L’Amour and Stephen King; it’s no surprise they would be favorites of many truckers.
I lucked upon a copy of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days on one long haul from Southern California to the Carolinas.
If you’ve never driven coast-to-coast alone, let me tell you it can be daunting—like you are just never going to get there. But somehow, completing my four-day, 2,500-mile trip while listening to what seemed like 80-cassette-tapes worth of Phileas Fogg’s 80-day trip around the world suddenly made a big chunk of the trip seem quite short.
I only had to drive across California, Arizona, New Mexico and the tip of Texas’s panhandle, through Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and finally to South Carolina, while he had to go all the way around the world.
Listening to the excitement, adventure, comedy and suspense of Fogg working his way around the world in 1870—by train, steamer, ice-boat and elephant as he passed through Paris, Egypt, India, Japan, the US, Ireland and more—made it easy for me to keep pushing on, knowing I only make it from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
If you want something even longer to listen to, it may be time to head back to Stephen King for all 48 hours of The Stand, which is #1 on Audible’s list entailing some of the longest, audio books they’ve ever listened to—it includes Moby Dick (25 hours):