Lynne Murray, who’s an author based in San Francisco, kept a spiral notebook journal 30 years ago on what she was reading. She uses her blog to re-examine what she read three decades ago and what she’s reading now.
Murray is reading two books that have Route 66 connections. She gives summaries of both:
Lost America: The Abandoned Roadside West, Troy Paiva (foreword Stan Ridgway): I started with Paiva’s web site at www.lostamerica.com where you can see his photographs taken at night of abandoned places. Drive-in movies, the decaying resort around the Salton Sea, ghosts of former military bases — photographed to bring out an eerie beauty. I immediately wanted the book as a gift for my road warrior, younger brother. Fortunately I could get a signed copy from the author. The stories Paiva writes of his adventures taking the pictures are as colorful and wild as the photos themselves
Route 66: The Highway and Its People, Susan Croce Kelly (text), Quinta Scott (photographer): The Piava book sent me back to re-read this photo essay and history. I had originally bought it because I used some Route 66 locations in Large Target. But the book was a keeper. It’s fascinating how that Chicago to Los Angeles highway was developed in the 1920s and ’30s — the road the Joad family took out of the Dust Bowl in “The Grapes of Wrath.” It boomed and played a major part in our national history through the ’70s until it was finally officially replaced by five interstates by 1985. My father and brother drove on it from Los Angeles to Chicago in the 1970s, and even then it took some doing to find it in places.
The Croce Kelly-Scott book is particularly invaluable because it shows people and places that are long gone. It was one of the first Route 66 books after the highway was decommissioned. Also, Scott’s “Along Route 66” is an extraordinary collection of photographs of Route 66 businesses, some dating back more than 25 years.