Road Trip Read-Alouds

It's summer! You and your family are going on a road trip! Oh, the freedom! Oh, the time on your hands! Oh, the distance you'll cover! Whatever you do, don't forget books!

When we were raising our seven children we had a big 15-passenger van. I read aloud as we traveled the long roads through nowhere. Because it was difficult to be heard and I didn't want to strain my voice my husband rigged up a microphone that transmitted through the FM van radio. It worked great. On one trip we read Cheaper by the Dozen and Tuck Everlasting which everybody enjoyed. At Zion National Park we even found a spring bubbling up by a tree and pretended it could make us live forever!

Here's an eclectic list of more road trip read-alouds for families with children of all ages:

Stuart Little
Mrs. Piggle Wiggle
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Sarah Plain and Tall
Missing May
Gone-Away Lake
Island of the Blue Dolphins
Magic or Not?
Wind in the Willows
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
The Little Lame Prince
The Prince and the Pauper
Understood Betsy
Good-bye, Marianne

Five Children and It
The Tale of Despereaux
The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe

Now that our children are grown, I read aloud to my husband as he drives. For some reason we seem to gravitate toward nonfiction, maybe because they are books we would both equally enjoy. What a lot there is to learn and explore, on the roads and in our minds! We've marveled as we've made our way through these highly riveting, enjoyable, enlightening, and sometimes jaw-dropping reads:

Devil in the White City
The Disappearing Spoon
The Children's Blizzard
In the Garden of Beasts
Freakonomics
Is There a Zoo in Zoology?
Is There a Cow in Moscow?
Killing Lincoln
The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Travels with Charley
Helen Keller's The Story of My Life
The Abolition of Man and The Great Divorce
Ameritopia
A Patch of Blue

Appropriately, we read Travels with Charley on what is called "the loneliest highway in America," Tom Sawyer after a stop in Hannibal, Missouri, and The Children's Blizzard on and around its January anniversary. But we usually don't care about any sort of synchronicity. It's all good.

Some more favorites off the top of my head, fiction and non, I think might be good to try aloud on car trips with husband Steve:

The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread
Blue Skin of the Sea
Island of the Colorblind
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
Gentle Regrets
A High Wind in Jamaica
Wordstruck
Man's Search for Meaning
Flowers for Algernon

Catcher in the Rye (bleep, bleep!)
The Yearling
To Kill a Mockingbird
Father Brown short stories
Peace Like a River

Do your best to pick out something that will work well. But if after several minutes everybody isn't at least somewhat interested, best to try something else.


What is better than reading in the car on a seemingly endless road trip, aloud or silently? One summer when I was a teenager I went on a road trip camping with my best friend, her parents and brother. In the station wagon she had brought along a whole cardboard box full of paperback books. The one I distinctly remember reading was The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread by Don Robertson. It was so different and real and intense. When I became an adult I purposely searched for it in the library and read it again. Decades later, I own my own copy. I remember my friend's dad being a little frustrated with us for burying our heads in books and missing all the spectacular scenery of . . . let's see, where were we? Some national parks and mountains in the west somewhere.

Happy trails!