To go somewhere with Brian Benson is a downhill coast, albeit winding, complete with diesel exhaust and all the saddle cramps one can endure in a two-thousand-mile bike trek—all the while trying to find the meaning of place and the where, how, and why we fit in with it. Going Somewhere (Plume, $16) is part memoir, part American travelogue, part summer explosion of twenty-something love, and all soul-searching life-quest that propels us to move forward, to reassess, and to reclaim, our own ambitions. Pedal by pedal. In this ode to visceral storytelling, we journey with Brian and Rachel from Wisconsin to Portland on the seats of two Fuji road bikes. The couple’s exploration of path and place challenges the notion of what it means to be a cliché millennial—that restlessness and commitment, travel and aspiration, tenderness and love are perpetual and also unattainable. Rather, this embodiment is steady to the course. Their course, a millennial course, is all the readier to be made.
