Read Any Good Books Lately?

My bookshelf is filling up slowly, but surely! The latest acquisition is the Tour de France for Dummies, which I bought at Amazon.com. This book covers every aspect of the Tour thoroughly and while doing that, provides an insight into the techniques and methods of how teams compete. Some sections detail the Rules, Race Strategies, Where to Watch the Tour and the Bikes. And that's just a fraction of the table of contents.

Compared to the couple other Dummies books I own, there are two notable differences with this one. The dimensions are far better than the larger traditional size, which makes it very handy for carrying around, and the attempts at humour (which I find they are so good at) is much more scaled back. This makes for very comfortable reading! I love humour when I'm reading and though they're witty with it, it had become cumbersome due to the amount that they'd put into the text. These new changes are just great!

From Lance to Landis is another excellent book. David Walsh is an excellent journalist and presents facts learned from interviews. He never mud-slings his subjects and pays compliments where they're due, giving the reader confidence that the book is not a vendetta, but simply a presentation of corroborated incidents.

The Official Tour de France Centennial is very interesting. I'd say it's more of a reference work than anything else. It's a re-print of the newspaper reports that appeared in L'Equipe and covers every single Tour ever staged (no pun intended, heh...) And it's packed with photos which alone are a treasure in themselves.

And Bicycle, The History is a fine, fine read! Fully illustrated, it gives the history of the bicycle and the countries that it grew up in. (I'd raved about this book before.)

So there it is, a whole four books in my collection! That's a good start. I can't wait to add to the bottom shelf of the [photoshopped] bookcase. Got any recommendations?