Recommended reading.

Because books look and smell great.

Let’s face it: too much screen time sucks, and if work forces you to trade your failing eyesight for a bi-weekly paycheck, ease the strain and retrain your brain by reading honest-to-God paper books in your spare time.

As an aspiring artist and early adopter to MTV, I didn’t care to read until my in-laws introduced me to Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie in the mid to late Eighties. Now, it seems, I’m always making up for lost time, and what a great time it is to turn our attention to the bookshelf.

Amazon started out catering to the bookworm in the mid Nineties, but 25 years later it’s taken on more of a monolithic Big Brother bent, which doesn’t always sit well with me (shopping convenience and Prime video access aside). Several independent book shops sell products on abebooks.com, a service I’ve used extensively in 2020. Among the gems I’ve added to the shelf are listed below, with a short description to whet your appetite heading into the holiday season.

The Rider by Tim Krabbé (1978)

For decades I’ve had a love-hate relationship with the bicycle. For a time it put food on the table, and was my everything: exercise outlet, mental escape, transportation and gateway to seeing the world.

Dutch journalist, chess champion and author Tim Krabbé came to prominence after publishing De Renner (The Rider) in 1978, a stream-of-consciousness short novel about bicycle road racing that was translated to English in 2002.

It took me a couple tries to get into the mindset to appreciate Krabbé’s style and wordplay, but as any cyclist will tell you racing is all a mind game with some physical ability thrown in for good measure. Former pro racer Laurens ten Dam payed homage to The Rider with this from-the-saddle video.

Krabbé’s genius? He recounts a 150-kilometer race in 150 pages.

Fun fact: his actor brother Jeroen played the villainous Dr. Charles Nichols in The Fugitive (1993). 

The Racing Driver: The Theory and Practice of Fast Driving by Denis Jenkinson (1959)

Who are you gonna trust with automotive advice, a YouTuber with perfect teeth and a questionable audience reach, or someone who co-piloted Stirling effing Moss to victory in the 1955 Mille Miglia, a 1,000-mile sufferfest on public roads in a Mercedes 300SLR? Not only was Denis Jenkinson a renowned motorsports journalist, he also knew how to push the pedal in anger. 

My copy of The Racing Driver included a business card hidden between its pages, with the name Hank Montonen listed as the sales person at Vasek Polak Porsche in Manhattan Beach, California. Further research discovered that Hank was a pedigreed racer, finishing ahead of Moss in 1962. How cool is that? 208 pages.

How to Build a Motorcycle: A Nut‑And‑Bolt Guide by Gary Inman (2020)

Gary publishes Sideburn Magazine, and is one of the world’s foremost evangelists of flat track racing, its machines and riders, so it’s only fitting that he published a book to encourage the great unwashed like us to try and create something original. Illustrated by Adi Gilbert. 192 pages.

Here’s a podcast with Gary. 

Papillon by Henri Charrière (1969)

Let’s see a show of hands from Steve McQueen fans who are steeped in movies other than The Great Escape or Bullitt; cool! McQueen portrayed a ‘wrongly-charged’ French prison breaker alongside Dustin Hoffman in Papillon (1973), a departure for the usually suave leading-man-who-gets-the-girl-and-drives-something-cool actor who bankrolled and appeared in Bruce Brown’s influential documentary On Any Sunday two years prior.

McQueen’s character Papillon sports a bitchin’ butterfly chest tattoo, just like the namesake of the movie and author of the international best-selling memoir of the same name. Upon publication it spent 21 weeks as number 1 bestseller in France, with more than 1.5 million copies sold in France alone. Since then, 239 editions of the book have been published worldwide, in 21 different languages.

Like John Steinbeck and other creative writers who blended fiction with real events, the book captured the imagination of the beast within everyone who feels trapped in life and needs to bust out. Maybe this is the book we all need to read to reflect on a rather unforgettable 2020? 566 pages.

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road by Matthew B. Crawford (2020)

In recent conversations with friends and family, the topic of digital technology has come up more than a few times. From a timetable perspective, let’s call this BI (before the internet) and AI (after the internet). 

In simpler BI times, books, magazines, newspapers, maps and letters comprised the ways in which we learned things and communicated. Hand-eye coordination was in full force because it takes an effort to grab a book from the shelf after it was purchased from the store, a magazine or newspaper from the newsstand or mailbox that rests on the coffee table, maps from the desk drawer or glove box, and letters that required a typewriter or fine penmanship to draft before inserting into a stamped envelope.

This isn’t my Luddite’s diatribe against technology so much as it’s a simple description of what’s missing from our daily routine in 2020 when a smartphone, laptop computer or streaming television has taken the place of all that was part of life a mere 20 years ago.

Motorcyclist, car builder, philosopher and author Matt Crawford goes a bit deeper in his latest book to get to the heart of the threat that current and future AI technology will afflict on the simple act of driving a car. Matt relocated to Silicon Valley with his family in 2019, so he’s in the thick of it like many of us Bay Area folks.

Autonomous vehicles and rideshare programs certainly have their place in the human ecosystem, but when BIG Tech gets involved like they have, a huge pot of gold is blinding sensible people from pushing back on the tsunami-like effort to rid the road of anything but. Crawford relates several anecdotes and references studies and reports to explain the title of his book, and what it means beyond being a motorist. 368 pages.

What books do you recommend and why?