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Originally Posted by backofbeyond
It's been a while since I last read These are the Days etc but a little like Zen and the Art etc you start off wishing you could lead his lifestyle and then end up pleased that you don't. Both the best of times and the worst of times at the same time.
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IMO, Dan's work is nothing like Zen and the Art.
For me, only readable part of Pirsig's "Zen and" were his literal bike maintenance parts, too few and far between for me.
The rest were scattered thoughts of a semi boring Philosophy teacher.
In contrast, Dan's book is mostly totally readable ... funny and entertaining, save the very end ... which gets a bit depressing. But mostly we see humor everywhere ... which is very hard to do!
But as I said above ... IMO, all his BEST WORK can be found in his earlier BIKE articles. All funny, up beat, crazy ... and FUN! (a good editor can make even an average writer look brilliant!)
Quote:
Originally Posted by backofbeyond
Pity that Dan wasn't around for the 'is this the real life, is this just fantasy' early days of Bike but making it back from his first 'road test' might have been problematical.
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So did you actually read his BIKE articles? His Africa stories were some of my favs.
2nd album syndrome is tough. As much as I wanted to love Ted Simon's follow on books ... I did not. Jupiter was it. His Zenith, IMHO.
The guy being left out ... a real current pioneer ... is Austin Vince.
Hopefully we'll get a new crop of young traveler geniuses soon to re-define the genre and keep us interested.
Same Manicom tried to pass off a trip he'd made 5 years previous for a current Adventure book. Some decent writing ... but a bit sleepy for me. A classic "jumping on the ADV band wagon" guy.