Also Monday, I gave you all the basics on the first book I chose as part of this - Roll Around Heaven All Day: A Piecemeal Journey Across America by Bicycle. I hereby give you the Good, the Bad and the Verdict of reading it.
The book is a first-person travel diary from Stan Purdum, a man who turns 50 and decides to fulfill a childhood dream of biking across the United States. This happens in three chunks because, being 50 and all, he has a job and a family, and the U.S. is pretty freaking huge and time-consuming to travel across.
In one, he goes from Oregon to Wyoming with his younger brother. Then he goes across Virginia with his teenage daughter. He heads across most of the Midwest alone.
The book switches between straightforward trip narrative with heavy focus on the people he meets and the places he sees, quasi-philosophical musings and facts/reflections on cycling.
The Bad: This is not a man who has a good sense of what details are appropriate where. Especially when he's riding with his family you get either way too much information or not enough about his brother and daughter. Frankly, he isn't very good at weaving the themes of his personal relationships in with the rest of the narrative, so the book gets bogged down when he tries. Lots of detail, not much substance.
For example - it's interesting to hear once that his brother has sleep apnea and requires a special machine to sleep. It's annoying to hear about whether every single campground they stay at is equipped so he can use the machine. I also vowed to find the man and shove a burger up his...yeah...if I heard one more time what everyone's exact order was at every single food stop.
The weakest part of the book is the stretch with his daughter. He is so busy explaining his kid that he hardly gets to the actual trip, and his constant explanations make her seem insipid and weak. You can't ever relate to or like the daughter. We never really see her because her dad is in the way, constantly fluttering about whether she's tired or whether she's in a good mood.
And...and...he skipped Grand Teton National Park and Jackson! You want to beat him a little, because he ends his west coast leg bitching about how Yellowstone is a bad road cycling park - which is pretty common knowledge around here - and if he'd just kept it up maybe one more day, he would have been in the midst of one of the most beautiful and best cycling areas in the country. Frustrating, I tell you!
The Good: When he sticks to discussing the trip itself, and his own motivations for it, Purdum is really a very personable narrator. He is clearly really into the trip and the experience of a long-distance cycle tour, and his enthusiasm is catching. At its core, this book is about a man living his dream before age makes it impossible to do so, and that is really a powerful thing.
That narrative is the one Purdum tells very well, and when he allows it to dominate the story, his writing gains an authentic voice it just lacks when he's dealing with the family or spiritual aspects. His prose evens out, the narrative moves and you actually feel like you're on the trip with him.
Plus, he has a good-natured humility about his cycling limitations. He enjoys it, clearly, but doesn't try to prove what a seeeeerious biker he is. Granted, he's on a trip across the country. He kind of doesn't need to.
You get periodically irritated with Purdum, but overall you like him, and that's key to a book like this.
Reviewers on amazon.com get down on him for how light the book is on "technical" stuff regarding both equipment and technique. Since most of those reviews start with "I am a longtime touring cyclist" I tended to think they were full of shit. Purdum actually does include quite a few technical details of cycling in general - enough that I sure expanded my vocabulary, for what it's worth.
The Verdict: I'm glad I read it, but I think once was enough. I think more than anything, my trouble with this book is that it wasn't really my style. But then, Purdum and I don't seem to have much in common aside from the cycling thing and this is a first-person narrative, so that's not terribly surprising. I know plenty of people whose style this would be, and even recommended the book to one of them a few days ago.
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