Travels With Charley In Search Of America

John Steinbeck

"I wanted to read Travels With Charley because I've read a few other books by Steinbeck and really enjoyed them, and I wanted to see how he would write a nonfiction novel, if he had the same elements of storytelling in it.

Travels With Charley is about Steinbeck's journey -- when he was 60 years old, he drove around the country with his dog Charley, to kind of get a sense of -- it's called Travels With Charley In Search of America, so just to get a sense of the country.

I liked that it was still written as a story. It's nonfiction again, but it kind of carries through like a story, and he really gets you involved in his travels, and the characters that he meets along the way become actual characters; they're just people that he meets at truck stops and things like that, but they're almost like characters in his other stories. He has a really interesting way of including his thoughts and his mental conversations with the dog, so the dog becomes a character too, and you kind of gauge his responses as well.

I think it can really relate to what's going on today. It would be a good read for history students in high school. I think it should be included in a lot of things. A lot of people should read it.

I would definitely give this five stars. I think it's -- it's a short read, it's only about 260 pages. It doesn't -- he kind of gets right to the point, if there is even a point to it, and it just -- it really makes you think about your life and your satisfaction with it."

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