Books
Peart is the author of five non-fiction books, the latest released in September 2012. His growth as an author predates the published work by several years (not including his work as Rush's primary lyricist), through private letters and short travelogues sent out to a small circle of friends and family.
Peart's first book, titled The Masked Rider: Cycling in West Africa, was written in 1996 about a month-long bicycling tour through Cameroon in November 1988. The book details Peart's travels through towns and villages with four fellow riders. The original had a limited print run, but after the critical and commercial success of Peart's second book, Masked Rider was re-issued and remains in print as of 2006.
After losing his wife and (at the time) only daughter, Peart embarked on a lengthy motorcycle road trip spanning North America. His experiences were penned in Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road. Peart and the rest of the band were always able to keep his private life at a distance from his public image in Rush. However, Ghost Rider is a first-person narrative of Peart on the road, on a BMW R1100GS motorcycle, in an effort to put his life back together as he embarked on an extensive journey across North America.
Years later, after his marriage to Nuttall, Peart took another road trip, this time by car. In his third book, Traveling Music: The Soundtrack of my Life and Times, he reflects on his life, his career, his family and music. As with his previous two books, it is a first person narrative.
Thirty years after Peart joined Rush, the band found itself on its 30th anniversary tour. Released in September 2006, Roadshow: Landscape With Drums, A Concert Tour By Motorcycle details the tour both from behind Neil's drumkit and on his BMW R1150GS and R1200GS motorcycles.
Peart's next book, Far and Away: A Prize Every Time, was published by ECW Press in May 2011. This book, which he worked on for two years, is based around his travelling in North and South America. It tells how he found in a Brazilian town a unique combination of West African and Brazilian music.
Peart worked with science fiction author Kevin J. Anderson to develop a novelization of Rush's 2012 album Clockwork Angels; the book was published by ECW Press. Snippets of the band's lyrics can be found throughout the story.
Read more about this topic: Neil Peart
Famous quotes containing the word books:
“Like dreaming, reading performs the prodigious task of carrying us off to other worlds. But reading is not dreaming because books, unlike dreams, are subject to our will: they envelop us in alternative realities only because we give them explicit permission to do so. Books are the dreams we would most like to have, and, like dreams, they have the power to change consciousness, turning sadness to laughter and anxious introspection to the relaxed contemplation of some other time and place.”
—Victor Null, South African educator, psychologist. Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, introduction, Yale University Press (1988)
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—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.... Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)