Travelogues are boring, especially the ones about cycling.

My 30th birthday present to myself was to quit my job, set out from Seattle, and maybe cycle the world. BOOK RED begins this insane journey. When my bike started falling apart in the first two days, things weren’t looking so good. When pedaling 9 hours a day wasn’t supplying enough serotonin, things weren’t looking so good. An elated mind will smile at strangers; a diseased one will make games of passing bottles of urine, dead animals, and roadside crosses.

I die in the book, a few times. In fact, it's one of my favorite things to do while cycling. Though many have cycled to Mesa Verde, I detour into the Hopi’s Land of the Dead. Hallucinations of a former lover haunt at the most unsuspecting times: on a frisbee golf course, behind Germany’s Disneyland castle, and chasing rabbits at night. The songs and poems in the book hearken back to a time before the DSM, while ridiculous recipes don’t offer assurance I’m going to make it.

THIRTY has all the pieces of an adventure novel: how to fix things, unreal encounters, braving the unknown... yet seems to see everything the wrong way. The world it creates, the choices made, are at times absurd, but when you're in unfamiliar places and only talk to strangers, it all starts to makes sense.