We’re no experts — everything we know about cars we learned from Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee and Mad Max: Fury Road — but we keep hearing that the Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix (July 8th – 17th) features “the only on-street racing anywhere outside of Monaco” and is not to be missed!
Below are some of Littsburgh’s reading recommendations for the Grand Prix, inspired by Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s 90,000-book reading challenge. If you’re in the market for more recommendations, check out some amazing excerpts from local and visiting authors right here on Littsburgh!
Katie recommends The Spoils of Time series by Penny Vincenzi
An epic, delicious, irresistible sweeping saga of power, family, politics, and passion starting in WWI England and spanning to the mid-20th century, this series follows the Lytton family running a publishing house in London in the midst of key moments of history. Read all three. And… I think they drive fun cars from time to time, too.
From the publisher:
“Set against the tumultuous backdrop of London and New York in the First World War, No Angel is, as British Good Housekeeping wrote, ‘an absorbing page-turner, packed with believable characters and satisfyingly extreme villains, eccentrics, and manipulators.’ Readers of Maeve Binchy, Barbara Taylor Bradford, and Anita Shreve will fall in love with this epic, un-put-downable novel…”
Rachel recommends Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Magical Car by Ian Fleming
If you’re like me, you probably know all the words to the musical — but it was a book first! It might seem like the obvious choice, but when was the last time you read Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a car on a mission to stop a criminal gang in its tracks”… and it’s by Ian Fleming of 007 fame. What’s not to love?
From the publisher:
“‘Crackpot’ is what everybody calls the Pott family. So when they go to buy a new car and come back with a wreck, nobody is surprised. Except for the Potts themselves. First, the car has a name. And she tells them what it is. Then they find out that she can fly. And swim… Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a car on a mission to stop a criminal gang in its tracks — and she is taking the Potts with her! Jump into the world’s most loved magical car for her first adventure.”
Nick recommends Road Scholar by Andrei Codrescu
Andrei Codrescu is one of my favorites — has been since he came to talk about poetry to my fourth grade class! If you listened to NPR in the 90s, watch some of the clip below… I guarantee you’ll recognize his voice.
From Publisher’s Weekly:
“Approached by a TV producer to make a documentary about a drive across the U.S., Codrescu, Romanian-born poet and commentator on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, declined. He didn’t drive. But after pondering the tradition of American rediscovery by such notables as Walt Whitman, Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac, he took driving lessons and possession of a vintage (1968) red Cadillac convertible and set out to explore an America not on most maps.
For him that country stretches from the Nuyorican Cafe on Manhattan’s lower East Side, along the ‘psychic highway’ through the land of the Shakers, Mormons and Oneidists, to the Polish enclave of Hamtramck in the heart of Detroit, to the ‘holy dirt’ of Chimayo, N.M. not far from the community of Sikhs near Albuquerque, through the drive-in wedding chapels of Las Vegas to the San Francisco of poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Vietnamese immigrants.”
It’s also a documentary!
Road Scholar from Vladimir Paperny on Vimeo.
Image courtesy of ccbarr via Creative Commons
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