Scott K Fish

SKF NOTE: Ryan Holiday’s picks for July reading arrived a couple of days ago in my email. Holiday owns and operates The Painted Porch bookstore, he’s a writer, and he’s also a blogger.

It is gladdening to see Neil Peart’s book, Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road, on this July list of reading recommendations. I will write Holiday to thank him. And I am sharing with my blog readers what he said about Peart and Ghost Rider.

First, here’s an overview of the Painted Porch bookstore:

The Painted Porch is a small town bookstore, literally right in the heart of Main Street, Texas. Owned and operated by Ryan Holiday (author of The Obstacle Is the Way, The Daily Stoic, etc.), The Painted Porch carries a small collection of only our absolute favorite books. We don’t care what’s new or trendy, only what’s amazing. If it’s on our shelves, it’s because we read it and think that you should too. Period.

And here’s what Holiday said about Peart’s Ghost Rider:

There are some books that you simply cannot fully appreciate until you have kids. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is one of those books. Ghost Rider, which I read on Kindle in May 2010 (crazy, I just checked the dates–I bought it again exactly 14 years and 2 days apart), is another. Neil Peart, probably the greatest drummer of all time (of the band Rush), lost his 19-year-old daughter and then his wife 10 months apart. A car accident and cancer shattered his life… so he hit the road on a motorcycle, trying to preserve his “small baby soul.” As David McCollough detailed in his book Mornings on Horseback, when Theodore Roosevelt lost his wife and mother in the same house on the same day, he did something very similar. “Black care,” he wrote, “rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.” Ghost Rider, although a very different style than Bryson’s In A Sunburned Country, is another great among the travel/road trip memoirs. It hit me very differently now that I have a family of my own, and because I now know that after Peart picked up the pieces of his life, he would be struck down by cancer in 2020. What a life and what a talent, though. I saw Rush on their 30th-anniversary tour in high school. I was very lucky to witness his greatness in person.

Thank you, Ryan Holiday.