Riding With Rilke : Go Read It

With all the holiday parties now squarely fixed in the rear view mirror and life getting back to normal – whatever that might be – I’ve found myself in dire need of something a touch more mentally stimulating. Enter “Riding with Rilke” by Canadian author Ted Bishop. It’s a Ducati themed non-fiction novel that is part travelogue, part history lesson and equal parts motorcycle memoir.

Bishop as it turns out is both a professor at the University of Alberta in Canada and also just happens to be a long time motorcycle rider. After years in the classroom, he takes a sabbatical from teaching in order to pursue a research project on famed author Virginia Woolf at the University of Texas in Austin. Like all riders who have long trips in their not to distance future, Ted views the trip from Alberta to Austin as the perfect excuse or rational for a great individual motorcycle adventure. This of course necessitates the purchase of a brand new motorcycle – which anyone with motor oil running through their veins will fully understand – and while kicking tires at a local dealership Ted falls in love with a Ducati Monster.

On the surface this seems like a pretty straight forward trek with a clear end in sight, but a few pages later Bishop launches the reader into a whole other world — the world of an academic scholar in search of the authors he idolizes – and while it might seem overly educational or “to deep” it’s an absolutely marvelous adventure for the reader that transforms a simple road trip into an exploration of riding, writing, reading, living and in some cases dying.

At this point I don’t really remember how I got my hands on a copy of the book or why I bought it, but I haven’t read something this engaging in quite some time. Months. Maybe years. But I knew I was on to something special when I realized that I was dog marking pages and underlining passages to re-read later. “Riding with Rilke” is simply one hell of a read. A “I can’t put the book down, alarm clock be damned” kind of novel and inside the pages lies something entirely more interesting and profound then the usual Point A to Point B travelogue. If you’re looking for something to read I’d highly recommend it. (If you’re interested in reading more about the novel, check out this Austin Chronicle Review).