Excelllent: Least Heat-Moon's "Blue Highways"

I seldom pay full price for any book: I buy remaindered copies. My favorite bookstore is "Half-Price Books," a chain of stores around the country, but unfortunately not where I travel. There are two such stores where I now live: San Antonio.

But I was excited to read William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways and had no difficulty paying full price for the most recent edition (1999) soft cover.

The reviews at Amazon.com were overwhelmingly favorable and had a fair number of reviews (127, as of July 27, 2010). Those who didn't care for it remarked on the author's self-loathing and self-absorption.

I don't know if I would have been all that much aware of that self-absorption in Blue Highways had I not read his Journey to Quoz. I had difficulty reading that book; I got halfway through, wanted to finish it, but got back on the road again, and had to leave some books behind because I did not have enough room to carry everything. I will finish it when I get back to Los Angeles. The self-loathing was not the problem; it was his self-absorption. He was too smug now that he had a book on the New York Times book list.

The self-loathing did not bother me. Not at all. My favorite author, Hunter S. Thompson, admitted to fear and self-loathing on a regular basis. In fact, I think HST owns that phrase, "fear and self-loathing."

For those reviewers who were turned off by his self-loathing, they need to read the "new afterword" in the 1999 edition. It sheds a lot of light on his state of mind when he wrote that book.

The book is a series of essays, most only one or two pages long; few longer than three pages, so it makes for a very easy summer read. I have lived in or traveled to almost every area he devotes an essay and that made it very, very interesting. I found his observations very much in tune with mine.

If I had one complaint with his observations it was his contrasting thoughts on the journey from Austin, Texas, to Utah. He thought the desert was wonderful. However, he complained of the monotonous, flat prairie east of the Rockie Mountains and continuing to Minnesota. I know both places well: I grew up in North Dakota and now live in San Antonio. I have hitchhiked cross-country three times, and have driven those roads numerous times. Last year I took the bus from San Antonio to Los Angeles, and Amtrak from Portland, Oregon, to Chicago.

The southerners (Texans and others) were much more open to conversation and he struck up friendships with many people along the way. However, he found the folks from Montana to Minnesota to be much more reserved and taciturn. They seemed to him to be much more suspicious of strangers.

It should also be noted that the trip across the south was earlier in his journey, and the trip across the north was much later. By then, he was probably getting a bit tired of his trip around the states. His writing and attitude did "pick up" however when he got back to New England.

It is a book I will have to re-read, at least sections of it.

Some of the essays from this book were printed in The New Yorker. If you like human interest stories in The New Yorker, you will enjoy this book.