Road Trip Reads

Summer is a great season for reading!

School’s out, the schedules are relaxed, and maybe you have a vacation or two coming up this summer. While not everyone can read on the road without getting carsick, summer still offers many opportunities for downtime. Whether you’re heading for the beach, catching a flight out of town, or just spending a lot of slow time at home, grabbing an adventure novel is a perfect way to spend some of these lazy days of summer.

Some of the best stories center around outdoor summer adventures. These books can set imaginations on fire, inspiring us to spend more time in nature during these warmer months when plants are blooming, birds are nesting and raising their young, and late sunsets give way to lightning bugs.

If you’re a student, you may struggle to find extra time to read. While you may have plenty to read in conjunction with class assignments, reading a novel for sheer fun may take a back seat during the school year. Take advantage of the chance this summer to find your next adventure and escape into a character’s world.

If you like to write, a summer road trip can provide fodder for future stories. Wherever you travel, varied settings wait to be discovered. You might insert sensory details from a mountain hike or a beach scene. Perhaps you’ll set your next story in a National Park or historic site you visit this summer. Going to these places in real life helps make the settings in your stories come alive with realism.

In recent years, my family has taken three cross-country road trips out west. While I definitely encourage families to just look out your car windows and enjoy what you see, there is also time on a high-mileage road trip to spend some time immersed in a book or making notes for your next novel. Each of these trips have given me so many opportunities to observe new locations, and I’m often inspired to take in the seemingly mundane details of a road trip and incorporate them into a story. Our country has so much wild beauty in vast open spaces, all available for exploration and contemplation. What you write about these places may encourage somebody else to travel there.

The first novel in my Chalice Series, Firetender, begins with a road trip taken out of desperation by two teenage boys. Responsible 19-year-old Dallas sees it purely as a solution, a way to address the problem of his mother’s disappearance and his pending eviction. The more introspective 17-year-old Channing sees every new stop along their journey as an opportunity for wonder. The contrast between obligation and obliviousness, of pushing forward and hanging back to smell the roses, is what drives the tension between these two characters.

I hope this summer affords you some of the latter—time to slow down and smell the roses, enjoy a new vacation spot, explore a new trail, and read a book or three!

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About the author: Erin believes New Adult Contemporary Catholic Fiction should showcase struggles common to humanity through dramatic story and invite readers to see themselves in the characters' universal search for God and Truth. She is a Catholic homeschooling mother and author of three published books in The Chalice Series, including award-winning book one, Firetender. She lives with her husband and four daughters in North Georgia.  Her passion for vocations became strong when her youngest brother was ordained a priest.  Over twenty years of Catholic adulthood have given her time to grow and see what really matters in life with a focus on the good, the true, and the beautiful, and she wants her characters to find and reflect the same.  Reading the classics and Church Fathers and especially Chesterton alongside her homeschooled children has informed her current writings.

Erin is a member of the Catholic Writers Guild and when she’s not writing is busy reading aloud to her children, organizing a moms’ book club, building community with families from her church, and leading a forest school for local families to get out in the natural world.  She enjoys traveling and photography.