Originally Posted by
rootboy
In the meantime, I read all of the Harry Potter books. Not something I'd normally be drawn to, but found the whole set at a yard sale for seven bucks, and found them mildly interesting. I finished them though. Kind of fun, but I wouldn't do it again.
I got sucked into the HP series as well, but I'm a sucker for magic. I rolled my share of 20-sided dice as a kid. Read through the series when they came out and never thought I'd do it again either. But now I've got a young daughter and I'm on book 5, round 2.
Speaking of magic, and beyond the young adult genre,
The Fifth Business by Robertson Davies is fantastic. It's the first book in the Depford Trilogy, though inexplicably I never went on to read the rest of the trilogy (note to self). Someone I didn't know very well gave me a copy. I was very much a book snob at the time, and probably took it like I would now take food from a stranger off the street--with every intention of tossing it in the next dumpster. It was an unexpected joy in many ways!
I've been reading in Mike Burrows Bicycle design. Very interesting, pithy, opinionated, and(IMHO) very well reasoned. It's not enough to make me sell all my bikes and go full carbon yet, but some of the recumbent designs are super cool.
There's a different book by the same title you might enjoy:
Bicycle Design: An Illustrated History, by Tony Hadland and Hans Erhard-Lessing (MIT Press). The prose is bit plodding and dry, but it is a trove of arcane and innovative bike tech over the entire history of the bicycle and its precursors, and complimented with an abundance of illustrations from patent drawings of early spoked wheels and baby seats (e.g. Batchelder, 1898), catalogs illustrations and advertisements from long-defunct companies (e.g. 1871 advertising card for Frenchman Eugene Meyer, credited with inventing the wire tension wheel and the high-wheeler), through Rebour drawings of classic Campagnolo components, and more recent advancements such as disc brakes and monocoque frames. After a few beginning chapters on the early mutations of the bicycle we know today, the book departs from a chronological history to focus of topics such as lighting, racks/luggage, braking, transmission, mountain bikes, etc. A fascinating and relatively exhaustive (I get the sense the authors could have turned in a much longer manuscript if not reined in by their editor) book.