Best books ... chosen by Ted Conover

Ted Conover’s new book is The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today. Below, the author of the award-winning prison chronicle Newjack names six favorite road

Outside Lies Magic by John R. Stilgoe (Walker, $15). What John Berger’s Ways of Seeing did for traditional oil painting, this book does for roads and landscapes: It helps you to understand what you’re looking at, from the layout of towns to the placement of electric lines to the distance between street and dwelling. It’s a reminder that, even in a young country like the United States, we live in the past. And it’s an argument for going outside and opening your eyes.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac (Penguin, $8). Kerouac wrote this novel in the same year that The Catcher in the Rye was published, and some of the language feels as dated. But there is no purer expression in American culture of the energy and glory of road travel, of the possibility of transcendence through movement.

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