Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle

"Many congested cities around the world have been experimenting with bicycles as a solution, with public electric bike and scooter schemes making lots of European cities much easier and more fun to get around. As I biked across Rome, Italy, late one night this summer to catch the train back to my childhood home in Frascati—the wind in my hair and without even breaking a sweat—I said to myself, ‘This is it! This is the answer to life, the universe and everything!’ Reading Two Wheels Good by American journalist Jody Rosen was a robust antidote to my euphoric bicycle moment. It’s not only a history of the bicycle but a history of our attitudes to bicycles, both for and against. The current bike craze is only one of many since Karl van Drais unveiled his Laufsmachine in Mannheim, Germany, in 1817 and I still seem to spend more time in my car stuck in traffic than on my bike. I like books that look at how to live and explore what specific thinkers or traditions down the ages have to say on the subject that might help me get a better perspective on why we’re here. In How to Be Authentic , Skye Cleary writes about how the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir —author of The Second Sex amongst many other writings both fiction and nonfiction—has influenced her life. This is an existentialist take on being a human being, in other words, you have to make your own meaning and even your own person–there’s no mould you can just slip into. The chapters are divided into themes “Friendship”, “Happiness” etc. I recommend dipping into them one at a time rather than reading the book to cover-to-cover, as this is an impressive but exhausting personal philosophy. Another book to look out for, out at the end of September, is How To Be Good (in the UK) and The Quest for Character (in the US) by Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher whose interview on Stoicism —the personal philosophy he’s adopted to get through life—is one of the most read interviews on our site. The book takes a historical approach—the subtitle is ‘What Socrates Can Teach Us About the Art of Living Well’—and focuses on the qualities that make a good leader, a question many of us here in the UK have been reflecting on in recent years."