Some weeks I put four hours a day on the truck just getting between sites, flat highway the whole way, radio stations that fade in and out every twenty miles whether you want them to or not. Audiobooks fill that time the way nothing else does, and I’ve gotten strict about which books I’ll actually let myself drive-listen to versus which ones need to wait until I’m home with an actual physical copy and no wheel in my hands.
The rule I’ve landed on, after a few bad experiences, is that anything too dense doesn’t survive the highway. I tried Too Like the Lightning on a drive once, about forty minutes in, and had to pull over at a gas station and rewind twice because I’d missed a turn in the plot while checking my mirrors. That’s not the book’s fault. It’s a book that wants your full attention and the highway only gives it seventy percent of mine, tops, no matter how much I want to pretend otherwise.
What works on the road is usually plot-forward stuff, something with enough momentum that missing a sentence here and there to a merging semi doesn’t cost me the thread. Foreigner, oddly, turned out to be one of the better highway books once I gave it a real chance, the internal monologue actually suits half-listening in a way a plottier book sometimes doesn’t. Funny how that works out backwards from what I’d have guessed going in.
Priya thinks it’s a little sad that so much of my reading life happens in a truck cab instead of somewhere comfortable, and some days I agree with her. But there’s also something about four hours of flat Panhandle highway that clears out whatever’s cluttering my head better than sitting still ever does, and a book read that way sticks with me in a specific way, tied to a particular stretch of road, a particular week, in a way books I read at home mostly don’t.
I’ve got a mental map at this point of which books belong to which highways. That’s a strange way to remember a novel. It’s also just how it happened, and I’ve stopped trying to fix it.