Books for Saddlebags

No, this is not just another service manual, as the book title might imply. 'ZEN and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' by US author Robert M. Pirsig is a work of philosophical non-fiction, first published in 1974, at the end of the hippie era, which soon became influential and gained cult status. It represents a mixture of novel, biography and philosphical reflections about the increasingly technical American (or western) way of life during the 1950s and 1960s. This odyssey into life's fundamental questions was perfectly compatible with the counterculture that had just formed, in particular on the form of education and aims in life of the conservative post-war social classes in the US.

“In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.
On a cycle the frame is gone. You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.”

The Motorcycle Diaries is a book that traces the early travels of Marxist revolutionary Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, then a 23-year-old medical student, and his friend Alberto Granado, a 29-year-old biochemist. Guevara travelled 8,000 kilometres (5,000 mi) across South America on an old 500cc single cylinder Norton motorcycle. During the journey he is transformed by witnessing the social injustices of exploited mine workers, persecuted communists, ostracized lepers, and the tattered descendants of a once-great Incan civilization. The book ends with a declaration by Guevara, originally born into an upper middle class family, displaying his willingness to fight and die for the cause of the poor, and his dream of seeing a united Latin America.

On The Road, the most famous of Jack Kerouac's works, is not only the soul of the Beat movement and literature, but one of the most important novels of the last century. Like nearly all of Kerouac's writing, On The Road is thinly fictionalised autobiography, filled with a cast made of Kerouac's real life friends, lovers and fellow travellers. Narrated by Sal Paradise, one of Kerouac's alter egos, this cross-country bohemian odyssey not only influenced writing in the years since its 1957 publication but penetrated into the deepest levels of American thought and culture.

Imagine you’re a 20 year old student and your boy-friend Klaus (23) has a sister who lives in Japan. And now you also imagine your boyfriend plans to go on a 10 months trip to Japan to visit that same sister. And you go with him. At first only to Greece, but then you decide to go on.
That is the starting point for the true story of Claudia Metz, who together with her friend Klaus Schubert went on a trip from 1981 to 1997 - ten months planned turned into 16 unbelievable years Jahre, in which they traveled the whole world.
In this fantastic and thrilling report they both tell about their journeys without repeating themselves a single time, although they had visited some countries several times. This book provides an intriguing insight into foreign cultures and tells about their amazing experiences. However, this trip of a lifetime did not proceed without problems. Right at the beginning they started in that both motorcycles were completely overloadeded. During the journey, which never followed a predetermined route but which was set as it rolled on, the couple was arrested several dozen times, had numerous accidents and had to deal with various diseases, which they all survived with the help and friendliness of the respective residents.
To absorb the reader even more the book features wonderful photographs in the center section which makes it definitely positively unputdownable right from the beginning.

In late 1973 Ted Simon began travelling around the world on a Triumph Tiger 500 cc motorcycle. For four years he travelled over 64,000 miles (103,000 km) through 45 countries. Most accounts from his trip are detailed in his book, Jupiter's Travels, which became an international bestseller with more than 400.000 copies sold and made Mr. Simon a motorcycle icon.
cit.: "It was going to be the journey of a lifetime, a journey that millions dream of and never make, and I wanted to do justice to all those dreams."

"And then the run was on. Outlaw motorcyclists rolled in packs toward their annual July 4th outing, a time for sharing the wine jug, pummeling old friends, and generally terrorizing the populace".
Hunter S. Thompson spent one year preparing for this book in close quarters with the Hells Angels and their president Ralph "Sonny" Barger. Thompson was up front with the Angels about his role as a journalist, a dangerous move given their marked distrust of reporters from what the club considered to be bad press.
Far from being wary of this outsider the Angels were sincere in their participation, often talking at length into Thompson's tape recorder and reviewing early drafts of the article to ensure he had his facts straight. Thompson remained close with the Angels for a year, though ultimately the relationship deteriorated when several members of the gang gave him a savage beating or "stomping" over a trivial remark made by Thompson.
This book is - even more so today - a broad comment on the modern tendency to violence and sensationalism. It is also one of the first examples of the participatory "gonzo" journalism that Thompson perfected.

Hunter S. Thompson's documented drug orgy through Las Vegas would no doubt leave Nancy Reagan blushing and D.A.R.E. (US anti-drugs organisation) founders rethinking their motto. Under the pseudonym of Raoul Duke, Thompson travels with his Samoan attorney, Dr. Gonzo, in a souped-up convertible dubbed the Great Red Shark. In its boot, they hide two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicoloured uppers, downers, screamers, laughers ... A quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser a pint of raw ether which they manage to consume during their short tour.
On assignment from a sports magazine to cover "the fabulous Mint 400", a free-for-all biker's race in the heart of the Nevada desert, the drug-a-delic duo stumbles through Vegas in hallucinatory hopes of finding the American dream (two truck-stop waitresses tell them it's nearby, but can't remember if it's on the right or the left). They of course never get the story, but they do commit the only sins in Vegas: "burning the locals, abusing the tourists, terrifying the help." For Thompson to remember and pen his experiences with such clarity and wit is nothing short of a miracle; an impressive feat no matter how one feels about the subject matter. A first- rate sensibility twinger, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a pop-culture classic, an icon of an era past and a nugget of pure comedic genius.

Kingdom of Fear is billed as a memoir, but in essence, all of Hunter S. Thompson's books could fit into this category since his life and work have always been tightly bound together by a mythology largely of his own making. Still, this is certainly an unconventional memoir, but then what would you expect from the father of gonzo journalism? In these pages Thompson manages to dig deep and reveal a few "loathsome secrets" without offering the kind of personal details he has always avoided. He does, however, reflect upon his considerable legacy, including his well-known, and admittedly exaggerated, use of controlled substances ("The brutal reality of politics alone would probably be intolerable without drugs"), as well as offer assessments of his own work.

It's 1959. In a highrise hotel not far from the beaches of San Juan, a man is recovering from an animal of a hangover. Paul Kemp is an alcoholic journalist who's barely seen better days, arriving at the only job he can get: writing horoscopes for failing rag El News. His fellow hacks are mostly crazy drunks on the verge of quitting, so Kemp fits in perfectly. But then he meets the impossibly gorgeous Chenault and her flashy boyfriend Sanderson. Kemp soon finds himself in way over his head, party to shady business deals, caught up in car chases with enraged Puerto Ricans, and experimenting with a hitherto unknown hallucinogen, which will eventually transform Kemp into the kind of journalist known to the world as Gonzo.

The crazy tales of HST’s "coverage" of a Honolulu marathon event that ends up being a wild ride to the dark side of Americana. The Curse of Lono features all of the zany, hallucinogenic wordplay and feral artwork for which HST became known and loved. It complements the fury of Thompson's writing. It is pure visceral madness and stakes its claim with any of his best works, nothing short of what those of us who care have come to know as life-blood joy and the frenzied understanding of more than a few generations of enlightenment.

Since American author Edward Abbey (1927–1989) wrote his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, published in 1975, he is an underground hero. Easily Abbey's most famous fiction work, the novel concerns the use of sabotage to protest environmentally damaging activities in the American Southwest, and was so influential that the term "monkeywrench" has come to mean, besides sabotage and damage to machines, any sabotage, activism, law-making, or law-breaking to preserve wilderness, wild spaces and ecosystems.

'The temptation to write about yourself is irresistible, especially when you are prodded into it by a crafty publisher who has slyly baited you into doing it with a miserly advance of fifty dollars and a box of cheap cigars' - Groucho Marx. Groucho Marx's autobiography is a rags-to-riches story with a difference. The most outrageous and voluble of the legendary Marx Brothers had a career that stretched from Vaudeville to gameshow, conquering Hollywood on the way. From the triumphs and disasters of a life spent in show business to his unconsummated loves, Groucho's story is told with humour and wit and in Groucho's own unique style. As TS Eliot said of him: 'The mind boggles'.

America in the late Sixties: LSD experiences, San Franciso, Flower Power. And a bus trip like it never happened before and never will happen again. In 1968 Tom Wolfe wrote about the epic trip of Ken Kesey and his "Merry Pranksters" in this legendary classic, which has long become the New Testament of hipster mythology.

Seconds before Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy who, for the last fifteen years, has been posing as an out-of-work actor.
Together, this dynamic pair began a journey through space aided by a galaxyful of fellow travelers: Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed, three-armed, ex-hippie and totally out-to-lunch president of the galaxy; Trillian (formerly Tricia McMillan), Zaphod’s girlfriend, whom Arthur tried to pick up at a cocktail party once upon a time zone; Marvin, a paranoid, brilliant, and chronically depressed robot; and Veet Voojagig, a former graduate student obsessed with the disappearance of all the ballpoint pens he’s bought over the years.
Where are these pens? Why are we born? Why do we die? For all the answers, stick your thumb to the stars!

Facing annihilation at the hands of the warlike Vogons? Time for a cup of tea! Join the cosmically displaced Arthur Dent and his uncommon comrades in arms in their desperate search for a place to eat, as they hurtle across space powered by pure improbability.
Among Arthur’s motley shipmates are Ford Prefect, a long-time friend and expert contributer to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; Zaphod Beeblebrox, the three-armed, two-headed ex-president of the galaxy; Tricia McMillan, a fellow Earth refugee who’s gone native (her name is Trillian now); and Marvin, the moody android. Their destination? The ultimate hot spot for an evening of apocalyptic entertainment and fine dining, where the food speaks for itself (literally).
Will they make it? The answer: hard to say. But bear in mind that The Hitchhiker’s Guide deleted the term “Future Perfect” from its pages, since it was discovered not to be!

The unhappy inhabitants of planet Krikkit are sick of looking at the night sky above their heads–so they plan to destroy it. The universe, that is. Now only five individuals stand between the killer robots of Krikkit and their goal of total annihilation.
They are Arthur Dent, a mild-mannered space and time traveler who tries to learn how to fly by throwing himself at the ground and missing; Ford Prefect, his best friend, who decides to go insane to see if he likes it; Slartibartfast, the indomitable vice president of the Campaign for Real Time, who travels in a ship powered by irrational behavior; Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed, three-armed ex-president of the galazy; and Trillian, the sexy space cadet who is torn between a persistent Thunder God and a very depressed Beeblebrox.
How will it all end? Will it end? Only this stalwart crew knows as they try to avert “universal” Armageddon and save life as we know it–and don’t know it!

FLYING, ANYONE?
There are moments in even the most hardened V-twin rider’s life when he is confronted with non-motorized times: in yer tent, on the beach, in bed, in the finnish sauna – good for you when you have a good towel and some righteous reading matter with you. A book for example, which tells you how to fly: the knack is to throw yourself to the ground and miss. If you are reluctant to believe this, read it up in the mother of all guidebooks,
"The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams, – everything you need to know to travel in zero gravity conditions and with the speed of light.

Four good reasons, why you should have a towel with you at all times while travelling the galaxy:
Firstly it always reminds you of the galactic motto: DON’T PANIC!“
In wet condition it is secondly a great weapon for close combat.
Third: In a pinch you can suck vital nutrients from a towel that has been in use for three weeks, thus saving you from starvation.
Four: Three reasons are more than enough.
Five: The HHGG book and this towel tell them on every beach and at every biker bash that you’re a person of galactic format.

Something to smile. The adventures of Ratbike Atze, drawn by Jürgen “Toddy” Todtberg. It is plain to see that the author is a biker himself, because some of the situations which Ratbike Atze and his Panhead chopper encounter will certainly give you this special dejà vú feeling.