Books like Vroom With a View — picked by fans

Brian and his wife Marie (pronounced Marry) embark on a two-year epic road trip around Europe in Gemima the Hymer, an RV who would definitely have preferred to stay at home.  

Even without a Camper Van of Doom, resilience and a sense of humour are essential travel companions. With the scrapes these two get in, they needed plenty of both. I laughed out loud at the imaginative turns of phrases used to describe the tribulations, destinations, and people they met. This book stands out as one of the funniest I’ve ever read.

The author bought a Mazda sports car on a whim, which prompted him to plan a mid-life road trip through Europe. His wife Nat decided to go along for the ride, and I am so glad she did. The banter between them is like a comedy double act. 

Road trip memoirs are frequently a catalogue of calamities, a search for self, or a directory of delectable destinations. This book is notably devoid of disasters and empty of ‘eureka' moments. In fact, very little actually happens…  

Yet in a series of wry observations, witty perspectives, and entertaining sketches, Adrian captures the flavour of the trip masterfully, with huge belly laughs thrown in. I can’t wait to read more from this thoughtful, funny writer.

Entry into the Mongol Rally from Europe to Ulan Ude in Russia requires a car with a maximum engine size of 1.0 litre. The premise is that such a farcically inappropriate vehicle will invite adventure and interaction with locals. 

Obviously, a 600-mile odyssey across southern Britain in an elderly electric milk float, with unreliable batteries and a top speed of 15 mph invites all kinds of mishaps.

Comedy writers Dan and Ian tackle alternate chapters. Since Dan authored the bestselling trilogy Crap Towns: a guide to the worst towns in Britain, there is plenty of off-the-wall detail about the places they passed through. Reliant on the kindness of strangers and third man Pras, an electrician with magical powers, this is a gently comic, informative, and quirky alternative to Jerome K. Jerome’s classic.

Impecunious Brits George and his friend Mark decide to search for the ‘real’ America, crossing the continent from east to west in a clapped-out old car. 

At every point, amid clouds of smoke, impending mechanical Armageddon, and brushes with the law, it seems unlikely that they’ll make it. One night, in the middle of nowhere, when ominous sounds emanating from the engine, George pleads, “Not tonight, Josephine…!”

The author has a humorous conversational style and paints an unforgettable portrait of the unlikely places he passed through. I thoroughly enjoyed this bump-start, clunk, and judder across the States with the frustrating but lovable Josephine!

Food inspired by the traditions of Italy are well known around the world, and Mariani examines how the nation had an outsized impact on global food culture. Once considered an unsophisticated cuisine better known for macaroni or pizza, Mariani argues Italian food has since displaced French cuisine as the quintessential example of haute dining culture. His discussion of Italian food history largely centers how it disseminated globally. He discusses Italian American foods, but as part of the whole rather than as a distinct cuisine onto itself.    

Migration is the great theme of the twenty-first century. Our experience has set historians on a quest to see how new the mass movement of peoples really is. Isayev’s book is one of the first full-length studies of migration in Roman times.

It is enormously wide-ranging, bringing together the evidence of archaeology and of Roman comedy and history with the insights of geographers and sociologists. We see populations transplanted against their will, enslaved prisoners, hostages, and refugees, but also settlers and traders trying to make their fortune, and explorers and travelling scholars. Best of all we explore the ways that Romans thought about this, sometimes encountering chillingly familiar hostility but more often positive views of new arrivals. Romans often thought of themselves as a city of immigrants, and saw their willingness to accept newcomers as one reason for their success. Isayev does a wonderful job of opening up this new… show more.

This is a dazzling mix of theory, sociology, and history. Falasca-Zamponi is attentive to the myths, rituals, festivals and ceremonies, symbols, and recurring images of Italian fascism—and she is attentive, too, to the political power that Mussolini relentlessly drew from such cultural forms.

With tremendous analytical imagination, Falasca-Zamponi unpacks the significance of the fascist salute, Mussolini’s balcony poses, all the axe-and-bundle imagery, those omnipresent black shirts, and the fascists’ distinctive “passo romano” marching style. For me, the heart of the book is its intense analysis of fascist violence as spectacle. Not just spectacle, though. Falasca-Zamponi also makes the case that for the early fascists violence—“great, beautiful, inexorable violence,” in Mussolini’s words—was sublime, regenerative, glorious, salvific.

The early fascists made violence, Falasca-Zamponi suggests, as if it were art. 

This accessible academic work brings to life the inner workings – and breakdowns – of marriages at a time when annulment was the only option. Through court and ecclesiastical proceedings and petitions written by both sexes, the lives of ordinary women – including sexual relations, domestic abuse, cheating, and financial problems – are made even more real by the voices of friends, neighbors, and in-laws.

More often than not, people forget that the Vesuvian sites are, as gruesome as it sounds, large mass burials – not just of the cities themselves, but of people. The human remains of Pompeii (and by extension, Herculaneum) have been ignored or treated like some kind of circus attraction for centuries. What Lazar does is open your eyes to just how much information there is to be found from the casts and skeletons, and the potential to learn so much more about people and life in the first century. Her work is groundbreaking.

Ada Boni's culinary bible, Il talismano della felicità, first saw the light of day in 1928, six years after Benito Mussolini had succeeded in uniting Italy's quarrelsome regions under the banner of fascism.

Specifically targeted at the nation's housewives - ordinary folk on whose support El Duce rose to power in 1922 - this collection of nearly a thousand simple, practical traditional recipes for regional dishes became the dictator's favourite cookbook, as it did for generations of Italian women (still does). 

I first came across it on an Italian friend's recommendation while researching European Peasant Cookery and attempting to unravel the complicated traditions of a land that remains as fiercely partisan in the kitchen now as then.