Notes: Two old friends set out for a weeklong romp through California's Santa Ynez wine country that comically strains their friendship. Smart, hapless narrator Miles is divorced and broke, and his novel has been rejected all over town. His handsome, "ursine" best friend, Jack, a successful actor, is about to get married, and wants to enjoy a few last days of freedom.

Notes: At age 58, John Steinbeck and his venerable standard poodle, Charley, set out on a journey across America in a camper. For three months these companions traveled the nation, meeting friends, strangers, relatives, and immersing themselves in the fabric of the country as it was at that time.

Notes: A writer holed up in a room at his aunt's house, Paradise gets inspired to hit the road and see America. From the moment he gets on the #7 train out of New York City, he takes the reader through the highs and lows of hitchhiking, bonding with fellow explorers and opting for beer before food.

Notes: The setting is the Georgia wilderness, where the state's most remote white-water river awaits. In the thundering froth of that river, four men on a canoe trip discover a freedom and exhilaration beyond compare. And then, in a moment of horror, the adventure turns into a struggle for survival.

Notes: Prosperous insurance agent, leading citizen, and forgetful husband and father Raleigh Whittier Hayes runs off to New Orleans in search of his aging and eccentric father, his murky family history, Confederate gold, and some peace and quiet.

Notes: Antigone is a civil rights activist and grandmother who has joined a year-long, cross-country environmental walk. Tig realizes that her ties to home strengthen with distance, and she becomes a confidante for her family, learning more from their correspondence than she would if she was at home.

Notes: Argentine revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevera became Fidel Castro's chief lieutenant in the Cuban revolution, Cuba's minister for industry and later a guerrilla in Bolivia, where he was captured and executed in 1967. This high-spirited travel diary of Guevera's eight-month motorcycle journey across Argentina, Chile, Peru, Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela as a 23-year-old medical student in 1951-52 mixes lyrical observation, youthful adventure and anti-imperialist political analysis.

Notes: Penny is a thirtyish Beckett scholar with little hope of finishing her dissertation; she has a serious case of diabetes and a ghost from the past. It has been seven years since she mercifully injected her boyfriend, who was mauled by a bear in Alaska, with a fatal dose of her own insulin. Now she is cycling from Chicago to Alaska on a mission not even she fully comprehends.

Notes: A compassionate, quietly compelling debut from prize-winning short story writer Daniel Jones, about a young husband attempting to come to terms with his grief after his wife's death, while helping their two children do the same.

Notes: Beleaguered reporter Carl Streator is stuck writing about SIDS and grieving for his dead wife and child. But things only get worse: Carl accidentally memorizes an ancient African "culling song" that kills anyone he focuses on while mentally reciting it. Salvation of a sort comes in the form of Helen Hoover Boyle. Carl and Helen hit the road with Helen's Wiccan assistant, Mona, and her blackmailing boyfriend, Oyster, on a search-and-destroy mission for all outstanding copies of the culling song, as well as an all-powerful master tome of spells, a grimoire.