The movie "The Road" opened last week, based on Cormac McCarthy's bleak but powerful novel that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007. The book follows a father and son as they travel through a post-apocalyptic world looking for safety and other "good people." My first thought was that "Five books about a post-apocalyptic world" would be an appropriate five-books category. Then I decided that felt far too bleak, especially for dark and cold November.

So instead I give you "Five books about a journey that isn't as bleak as the one in 'The Road.'" Journey books are almost too easy, there are so many of them. Feel free to chime in with your favorites; if I get enough, I'll run a list of your recommendations. Here are five of mine:

The Last Grain Race, by Eric Newby. In 1938, Newby left London as a clueless city boy in slippery shoes, and after serving four months on a four-masted barque hauling grain from Australia to Great Britain, he returned a man. This is a funny, frightening, vivid book. You can feel him swaying as he climbs the rigging in gale-force winds, or gagging as he mucks out the pig sties. (The pigs were for eating.) All of Newby's books are about journeys -- he was a travel writer, after all. This is his first, and, I think, his best.

Blue Highways, by William Least Heat Moon. What a temptation, to just hop in the car and meander the back roads of America. And this is exactly what Least Heat Moon did, following those wavery thin lines on maps that indicate roads to nowhere -- or, at least, to places like Dime Box, Texas; Cape Porpoise, Maine, and Nameless, Tenn. First published in 1982, "Blue Highways" roams a very different America than what you might find now.

Full Tilt, by Dervla Murphy. In 1963, Murphy rode her heavy one-speed bicycle from her native Ireland to India during one of the most brutal winters in memory. Alone, she crossed Europe, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan before pedaling on into Delhi. Her book is remarkable not only for her amazing courage and spirit of adventure, but also for her strong, intelligent voice and her admiration and respect for other cultures.

Mississippi Solo, by Eddy Harris. Harris didn't know a lot about the Mississippi River and its locks and currents and boat traffic when he slid his canoe into the water at Lake Itasca and paddled south. He learned very quickly. He also learned what it's like to be a black man traveling alone through some very dangerous and redneck parts of the South. A classic road book, with the narrator growing and changing the farther he goes.

Which of course brings us to: Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. It's probably time you read it again, and this time not because your junior high school teacher tells you to.