When you think about a road trip, what comes to mind? A sizeable corral of literature beckons—Steinbeck, Kerouac, Pirsig, Wolfe, Bryson—hey wait, where are the women writers? Is Thelma and Louise our only touchstone, complete with its Freudian cliff-plunge ending? No. There are plenty of good women writers writing interesting [...]

Compilations of best first lines in novels abound on the internet, and they usually include Call me Ishmael. (Herman Melville); and, Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. (Gabriel Garcia Marquez); [...]