Originally read 1991
I read this book in the fifth grade. Can't remember much about it other than it being pretty surreal, but I still remember being able to completely escape into it.

Re-read August 2008
So, I just got this book from the library today, and read it this afternoon. Having just rekindled a love affair with my bicycle, this book has a superficial appeal for me. It is also just as mysterious to me now as it was when I was eleven years old.

It seems to be about a hollow, dead-inside kind of fella, a fella who doesn't really show or feel much emotion when he leaves his wife and then when his dog dies, and a fella who fears he is invisible.

He does, though, have a 10 speed bicycle which he got for his birthday. One day, almost a year later, on a whim, he takes it out for a spin, and his life is promptly changed.

He is amazed by the freedom and mobility provided by the bike, and through it he begins to rediscover his love of himself and his love for life.

At the climax of the book, he is reunited with his dead dog on the moon, to which he rode on his bicycle. I kind of expected the climax to involve his being reunited with his estranged wife, but it is his dog that is his salvation.

He's on the moon, with his bicycle and his dog. This book is all about being alone, it seems. And in fact, the story ends with our hero being alone, but he is no longer saddened by that.

The bike is, at various points in the story, a metaphor for isolation and belonging, confinement and freedom, worry and liberation, and, at one point, sex.

I'm going to read this one two or three more times before I send it back, and I will continue to wonder why this book was in an elementary school library when I was a kid.