November 29, 2023

7 Books and 7 Drives

Gary Barwin, in a typical act of originality, has created a wonderful list at 49thShelf called “Six Books on Six Trails,” matching his audiobook listening to the places where he walked with those books in his years. He writes, “There’s an intimate pleasure in listening to books as one walks. The voice speaks only to you. What it is telling you colours your surroundings. It’s a narrative soundtrack, mood music in words. Certain places become associated with certain events in a story or certain ideas discussed in a podcast. And these may pile up to become sedimentary auditory formations… It’s a literary trail map, a walking footnote.”

Which reminded me of the bend of highway that will forever remind me of poor Anne Innis Dagg trapped with a predatory man in an isolated cabin facing a choice between sharing a bed with him or sleeping on the floor with spiders (or something—the specifics have escaped me) even though the highway is in the middle of southern Ontario and the cabin was somewhere in Africa, but the highway just happened to be the place where I was listening to the book.

I don’t listen to audiobooks very often, but when I do it’s in the car with my family on any journey that will take more than a couple of hours, and these books are always a highlight of our trips, becoming intricately connected with the experience, however incongruous the place and subject matter.

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The Penderwicks series, by Jeanne Birdsall

Highway 11 north of Gravenhurst

We’d listened to audiobooks before, but The Penderwicks series were the first books that really “took” for us, because both our children were old enough to be engaged, and because the stories were interesting and nuanced enough to engage their parents as well. I know we read the first in the series from a book borrowed from the library, but I think all the rest were on audio book. We listened to these books on our summer trips to Muskoka and I remember the dips in the road when Mr. Penderwick was referring to his girlfriend Marianne Dashwood and how I was pretty sure I was onto him. The very last book in the series has little Batty Penderwick all grown up, and I recall finishing it just as we came off Highway 400 to join the traffic of the 401—for both the holiday and the series, we still wanted more.

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The Watsons Go to Birmingham, by Christopher Paul Curtis

Highway 400 through Barrie, ON

This book was from the same route on the map but during a more recent summer, and I recall driving up through Barrie and listening to the part where (I think it was) the big brother gets his tongue stuck to the wing mirror on the family car in the dead of winter. This is very much a book about the automobile, the Watsons coming from Detroit, as they do, and their huge family car being pivotal to the plot as they family makes its way south to Alabama in 1963. Their father rigs up a system where they can have an actual record player on the dashboard! On the way back a week later, we were driving through Barrie again when we got to the part about the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, and this novel brought that story to life for me in a way I’d never experienced it before.

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Pursuing Giraffe, by Anne Innis Dagg

Highway 35 through Norland, ON

We listened to this memoir on our very first trip to Big Hawk Lake, a new journey for us, and that feeling of not knowing where we were going with the story in our ears has woven the two together, so much so that every time we’ve driven by the end of the 404 ever since, I’ve recalled the specific point where Anne Innis Dagg’s boyfriend was being such an absolute jerk as she left him to fulfill her dreams of studying giraffes in the wild during the 1950s. (Spoiler alert: Reader, she married him!) And see my aforementioned point about the predator as we were making our way through Norland, ON, on Highway 35, not a giraffe in sight.

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Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie

Limberlost Road, near Huntsville, ON

I can’t remember who recommended Agatha Christie to us for family audiobooks, but we’re forever indebted to them. We borrowed this one from the library and it was not the Kenneth Branagh version, but we loved it all the same, and only got part way through on the journey up to the cottage and throughout the week kept thinking about reasons to jump back in the car and take a trip to town—just so we could hear the next part.

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Death on the Nile, by Agatha Christie

Highway 7, near St. Mary’s, ON

We listened to most of Death on the Nile this summer on our journey to and from Muskoka, but had some still left over for our camping trip to Pinery Provincial Park a week later (which is a really long trip). When I think of this novel set on a cruise ship in Egypt and all its nefarious characters, I think of the rural roads of Perth county, green fields and tobacco farms, no doubt just as Agatha Christie planned.

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The Infamous DNF

Highway 35 just south of Dorset, ON

The trouble with the Agathas is that now we don’t want to listen to anything else, but all Agatha all the time gets a little samesy. So we tried a different book for our getaway in August, and perhaps it might have been fitting if our children were younger and we were not all so primed for stories stacked with sex and murder, but we were all bored out of our skulls, and every time we thought the plot couldn’t get any less interesting, it did. We are persistent people and dogged in terms of books, but finally we just couldn’t take it anymore. We’d just taken a little trip to Dorset, ON, and as we drove out of town, we reached our limit. If that audiobook had been a physical thing instead of a file on my husband’s phone, we would have tossed it out the window.

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Bonus track:

Folklore, by Taylor Swift

On Route on Highway 401 near Port Hope

The ramp up to the Port Hope On Route on the 401 East is where I first heard the beginning to “The Last Great American Dynasty” and though that possibly this surprise Taylor Swift album, released in the middle of the pandemic summer of 2020, might grow on me, and did it ever. Not an audiobook, but literary in its scope and depth, we were listening to this on the way to our camping trip, one trip uncancelled in that year of cancelled things, and by the time we were driving back again a few days later, “Exile” was a song I was singing along to, even if the words weren’t right yet, and we’d come to fall in love with every track, each of which could be its own novel.