Van Dis posted:

This forum has terrible taste but here goes nothing.

I'm on a cross-country bicycle trip and would appreciate recommendations for actual good books relevant to the places I'm riding through. For example, so far I have read:

• Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent (before the trip)
  
• Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose (through the Columbia River Gorge, Idaho, and parts of Montana)
  
• Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It and Other Stories (along the Blackfoot River itself and other parts of Montana)
  
• John Fire's Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions (through the Indian reservations of South Dakota, including Pine Ridge)

And right now I'm blazing through On the Road. I am currently in Omaha and on my way through Des Moines, Kansas City, St. Louis, Nashville, Atlanta, then northeast through Richmond, DC, Philadelphia, New York, and finally Boston. Since you guys can't seem to read anything not in bold, let me just ask,

What literature do you recommend for going through those parts of America?

Keep your lovely science fiction, fantasy, airport books, milporn lit and all similar recommendations to your goddamn self, you worthless loving teenagers. I swear to Christ I will ride to your house and stab you with my spare spokes if you even think about posting that poo poo at me. I will tear your limbs off and beat you with them. I will kick a hole in your torso with my ironwoon legs. I will use your entrails as handlebar streamers. Why is this forum so obsessed with bad literature. It's like you are actually retarded, unable to read anything without a spaceship or elf babe on the cover, unable to think about words and sentences and paragraphs and narratives beyond "That was a cool fight/sex scene." God drat every single one of you.

(Also, I've read a ton of Mark Twain, which is what I'd recommend first to someone asking me this question, so don't bother recommending him. Thanks in advance!)