For someone whose livelihood is based on words, I am reluctant to admit that I've never been much of a reader. Perhaps I should clarify that: I've never been a pleasure reader. As a left-brain type, I have always read to absorb information — magazines, biographies, historical documents, and other non-fiction work — but never for the sake of entertainment. Then one day, while taking a piss at Road America, I found myself staring at a flyer taped above the urinal. It was an ad that I had seen taped to numerous bathroom stalls at numerous tracks throughout the Midwest for years, and it was for the novel The Last Open Road by Burt Levy. In that awkward moment, I had an epiphany: I'm a full-fledged adult with a wife and a kid and a mortgage and tax deductions — and I write for a living — maybe it's time to take up reading for its own sake. With that sentiment fresh in my head, I walked over to the 4-Mile Merchant gift shop and bought my very own copy. That night, in my room at the Osthoff Hotel overlooking Elkhart Lake, I started reading the first book that I ever found impossible to put down.

By weaving factual events with fictional characters in The Last Open Road, Levy paints a Technicolor picture of the thrill and danger and camaraderie of American road racing in the early 1950s. The story's protagonist is Buddy Palumbo, a 19-year-old New Jersey kid who wrenches DeSotos and Fords at the local gas station. He finds himself drawn into the sports car scene when a well-to-do regular customer, "Big Ed," buys himself a Jaguar XK120. Together they attend their first road race at Long Island's Bridgehampton in 1952, and they immediately become hooked.

For automotive historians, the book reveals the origins of numerous automotive cultural foundations — the East Coast snobbery of the SCCA (masked as the fictitious Sports Car Motoring Association), the deserved reputations of certain (mostly English) carmakers, the sketchy establishment of the first North American importers, and the personalities behind some of the most legendary cars of the day. No doubt car geeks from any era will also appreciate Levy's firsthand knowledge of the cars he writes about, as he puts readers under the hood for a secondhand education on the joys and pains of old sports cars. Check out this passage as Buddy troubleshoots a running problem on a fellow racer's MG TD:

"...it didn't take long to find the renegade tuft of insulation that was jamming the advance mechanism in the distributor. Ah-ha! On top of that, the point gap was down to six thousandths and the dashpots on both the S.U.s were bone dry. No question the mechanics at Westbridge had performed a truly piss-poor predelivery inspection...When I was done, that sucker fired right up on the first pull and settled down to an absolutely perfect 800-rpm idle."

The story continues through the 1952 racing season, visiting such iconic road-racing venues as Watkins Glen, Grand Island, Brynfan Tyddyn, and — quite fittingly for me — Elkhart Lake. 1952 also marked the end of an era, when road races were still run on open public roads, hence the title. At just 354 pages, I quickly found myself out of chapters and longing for more. Fortunately, Levy survived the creation of his first novel and delivered three more books that continue the saga of Buddy and Big Ed and all the other colorful characters (at least the ones that didn't kill themselves at the wheel) from The Last Open Road.

The second book, Montezuma's Ferrari, starts in late 1952 and focuses heavily on the Carrera Panamericana in Mexico, where open-road racing is still que bueno. Levy takes us into the disciplined mindset of the Mercedes-Benz race team, who showed up to win with their purpose-built 300SLs. This volume also sheds incredible insight into the politics of Ferrari at a time when Signore F. had authoritarian control over whom had the privilege of buying and racing one of his bella macchinas.

1952 is also significant as the year when, as a result of brutal spectator deaths, dedicated road-racing circuits started popping up in America, and one of the first was a repurposed Air Force base in Florida. With great accuracy, Levy captures the feeling of those who first drove Sebring's brutal surfaces:

"...it was still a pretty lousy excuse for a race track, what with skinny little blacktop access roads dumping out onto bomber squadron-sized runways that were almost as wide as they were long and looked like enormous concrete deserts. Oh, they'd marked the so-called 'race course' with a bunch of leftover 55-gallon oil drums, but it was all flat and empty out there...Plus it was rough as hell, since the big concrete slabs that had originally been poured perfectly flat with neat, pinstripe little tar joints in between had been thrashed by torrential tropical storms and baked under the relentless tropical sunlight and pounded by squadron after squadron of heavy, groaning aircraft all through the war years and then just been left to settle, which they did at some highly awkward angles."

The third installment, The Fabulous Trashwagon, picks up in 1953, and finds Buddy building himself a homebuilt racer from a wrecked Jaguar chassis and a Cadillac V-8. Anyone who has ever dreamed of building up his own Frankenstein project car should live vicariously through his experience. Again, you get the very real sense that Levy himself is narrating from firsthand knowledge of the process.

At 533 pages (of much smaller type), Trashwagon covers a lot more ground. There's a trip to Bonneville in '54, the horrific Mercedes crash at Le Mans in '55, and the inaugural race at Road America in September of that same year. Along with everything else, Buddy picks up a fledgling Volkswagen franchise, which — for anyone who's ever worked in a dealership — adds yet another rich layer of honest and ugly truth to the story of the American automotive scene.

The fourth book in the series, Toly's Ghost, picks up immediately where Trashwagon left off, but the location moves to California and the emerging West Coast road racing scene. Sadly, September 30, 1955 is best remembered by racing enthusiasts as the day James Dean died in his Porsche 550, and Levy captures the spoiled mood of the Laguna Seca races on that tragic weekend.

Toly's Ghost is an even longer read (672 pages) and covers much more ground, ending in 1961. A lot of the book involves the European Grand Prix scene, and for anyone whose interest lies in the birth of the modern Formula 1 era, this volume is a must-read. All the greats are woven into the story — Behra, Moss, Hill, Clark, Gendebien, Musso, Hawthorn — which reads more like a narrative history than a fictional story at times. Still, if history class had been half this interesting, I might have stayed awake through it.

For car enthusiasts of any stripe, Levy's series of "Buddy novels" are both entertaining and educational. His writing style is decidedly casual, the kind of colorful, conversational prose you might overhear at your neighborhood repair shop. There's even a love story, but Levy leaves the intimate details to the reader's imagination; these are no Harlequin Romance Novels. Intellectual readers will find the underlying commentary on mid-century social values like sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, and drug use enlightening — Levy's observations have a lot in common with those of AMC's Mad Men series.

A fifth volume is in the works, tentatively entitled The 200 MPH Steamroller. Levy anticipates a July 2009 release at Road America, giving fans of the series another fix. Having read the first couple chapters of the manuscript, I can only comment that readers will be in for a few surprises. Steamroller should be just as entertaining and enlightening as the previous four stories.

All of Levy's books, including The Potside Companion — a collection of short stories gleaned from his years as a racer, a mechanic, and even a car salesman — are available through the usual sources. However, you can also pick them up directly from www.lastopenroad.com, where you can have them autographed by the author. The website also sells swag related to the stories, which, once you've read the first book, you'll find yourself clamoring to own.