The book starts with longer stories ranging from Egan's first travel piece that got him a job at Cycle World to increasingly exotic trips to Japan for new Yamaha introductions or rides down the Baja Peninsula. What makes it work is Egan is always Egan and he brings his small town Wisconsin thrift, good humour and love of bikes with him where ever he goes.
As a writer about motorcycles, reading Egan's book offers some useful insights. One of my takeaways is: don't dumb down your writing. Say what you mean as well as you can possibly say it. Egan's not the only writer like this. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is more a philosophical post-graduate treatise than it is a book about bikes, yet many people who ride get into it. When I finally read it I was stunned that so many others think it such a fine thing - it took my entire degree just to make sense of it!
There's a folksiness to Egan's writing that reminds me of Neil Graham, the former editor of Cycle Canada. They both have a kind of relentless honesty to their writing and are willing to embrace their eccentricities. That's all good writing advice whether you're doing bikes or something else.
The long writing pieces are great but so are the shorter articles at the back where Egan takes on everything from mortality and aging to family tradition and engineering, though he tends to shy away from anything technical, which is odd because he was a mechanic for many years.
Because the pieces are chronological, you end up follow Peter through his life from poor, struggling student to established writer. The original pieces weren't designed with that narrative in mind but the layout of the book causes this trajectory to emerge, which is a nice thing to see as you're finishing the book, though it also reminds you that Peter's riding years may soon be behind him as he's in his seventies now.
I'm just finishing up the book now and I'm going to miss diving into it and listening to such a natural storyteller bringing bikes alive, though I can always get Leanings 2 (or 3!) and keep going. Unfortunately, 2 doesn't seem very available and is quite expensive on Amazon.
