Ordinary Eccentricity

A Meditation on Route 66 and the Charm of the Open Road

Today is publication day for Ordinary Eccentricity, my first non-fiction book in a decade. Ordinary eccentricity was the phrase that quickly came to sum up my impressions on a six-week road trip we took in 2018 that included Route 66, the Pacific Coast Highway, and a return through Montana, Yellowstone, Wyoming, and the Dakotas. The phrase captures both the eccentricity of the ordinary people who created Routh 66 landmarks like the Gemini Giant, the Catoosa Blue Whale, and the Cadillac Ranch, and also what an ordinary thing eccentricity itself is, how much it is a feature of ordinary people whose lives have not been homogenized by the company handbook. The book is a hymn to the architecture of small towns, which is eccentric because it was built by the act of love that formed individual buildings, which produced beauty, as opposed to the studied eccentricity of a modern architect.

Ordinary Eccentricity is exactly this, eccentricity that is not studied or deliberate, but arises from the love of ordinary people for ordinary places and ordinary enterprises in all their wild profusion and variety. In a world in which everything seems either deliberately plain and utilitarian or deliberately mad and ugly, we have a great need to recapture the spirit of ordinary eccentricity, and a road trip, particularly a road trip through the more open places where there are still cracks in the concrete of modernity in which virtuous weeds may sprout and grow, is the best way to begin this project of recovery.

The book is available now in all the usual places.

Here’s the cover:

Here’s the blurb:

And here, just because I am rather pleased with it, is the spine:

As always, if you like the book, you can do me a huge favor by leaving a review on Amazon, Goodreads, or anywhere else that pleases you. I ask this not for myself, but for the algorithms. They are ravenous and will bite an author’s hand off if not fed regularly.

And if you know someone who loves travel books, or Route 66 in particular, please let them know about the book. They and I will both appreciate it, I am certain.