Roy H Williams once wrote, “lives, like money, are spent. What are you buying with yours?”. This is a question that many of us will struggle to answer coherently, I suspect, but not Robert Penn. For Penn is a man with enthusiasm for all things pedal-powered; he has ridden a bike for thirty-six years, on nearly every day of his adult life, including one 40,000km, three-year, round the world trip as an apparent reaction to having been a pin-striped solicitor for too long. As his book “it’s all about the bike” – a cheeky riposte to Lance Armstrong’s best-selling biography about recovering from cancer to win the Tour de France – opens, Penn owns five bikes in various states of repair, but has decided he needs a new one. “I could go online right now with a credit card and spend £3000 on a mass-produced carbon or titanium racing bike” he writes. “It’s tempting, very tempting. But it’s not right. Like many people, I’m frustrated at the round of buying stuff that is designed to be replaced quickly…I want the best bike I can afford, and I want to grow old with it…I want MY bike.”

Robert Penn

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The blogosphere is well suited to the coverage of extended journeys or endurance achievements; there have, in recent years, been several excellent blogs written by cyclists (Tom Kevill-Davies’s The Hungry Cyclist and currently Alastair Humphreys’s terrifically entertaining blog covering his round the world cycle ride are just two of them) and a few of these have been the catalyst for full length books, proving not only the enduring popularity of cycling but just how much the public’s imagination i-s fired by tales of such feats of strength, daring and will to succeed.

Following on from “The Man Who Cycled the World”, an account of his record breaking trip of 2008, “The Man Who Cycled the Americas” is Mark Beaumont’s next major undertaking, cycling down the back bone of the continents of North and South America.

Mark Beaumont

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You’ve Gone Too Far This Time, Sir! is the true account of Danny Bent’s journey from the UK to India…by bike. Inspired by teaching his class about underprivileged children in a village in India, he decided to go there to teach and help the children. When one of the children in his class in the UK asked how he planned to get there, his first thought was to reply “Plane, of course”, but he realised that by doing that he could undo a lot of the good work he had done in teaching the class about environmental issues. So he said he would cycle…

The journey is nothing short of epic. India is far away – even by plane. To travel there by a non-motorised form of transport is a huge undertaking, through Europe, Russia, Kazakhstan, China and Pakistan among other place.

Danny Bent

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When I made the transition from a compact digital camera to a digital SLR last summer, I knew there was going to be a lot to learn. The instruction manual that came with the camera did not give enough information, and I have since been looking at books that could help me to take better quality photographs. Perhaps the best I have looked at so far is Michael Freeman’s “101 Top Digital Photography Tips”. The quality of the paper and the superb design of the book immediately draw you to it, but as you start to leaf through the pages you realise that there is much more to it than the look and feel. It delivers on information for all levels of photography, whether you just point and shoot or you are a professional.

Michael Freeman, photography

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Men are famously poor at dealing with growing older. The classic mid-life crisis usually involves a mistress or a Harley Davidson (possibly both) but in the case of Dominic Prince, it was a very different type of passion that kicked in. Standing on the scales on his 47th birthday, Prince could barely see past his belly but the truth was there – he was nearly 17 stone. He drank too much, ate FAR too much, smoked cigars and got out of breath if he took any exercise. Rather than join Weightwatchers or take up golf, Prince decided to he wanted to become a jockey because he had liked to ride when he was younger. It’s not the most obvious of things to want to do – it would be like me deciding I want to become a gymnast because I’d done a passable handstand in primary school.

Dominic Prince

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World Cup time is possibly the best time to bring out a book on Sachin Tendulkar, so that his fans can both read and admire his current exploits live on the television. Perhaps the only Indian who has touched as many lives as Sach is Amitabh Bachchan. Both are figures for a millennium. Tendulkar is even more unusual because his life has never been touched by scandal, nor has he been seen to lose his cool under the greatest of match pressure, which makes him a role model for young India.

Sachin – Genius Unplugged is a collection of 18 essays deftly edited by famous cricket writer, columnist and author Suresh Menon.

cricket, Suresh Menon

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The Fight is the late writer Norman Mailer’s acclaimed book about the 1974 World Heavyweight Championship bout between champion George Foreman and challenger Muhammad Ali in Kinshasa, Zaire. Mailer was there to expertly cover The Rumble in the Jungle and infiltrated both camps (Ali in particular was a friend of Mailer) to get an inside picture of the famous encounter. The book is his account of the build-up and fight, the personalities, the entourages, the intrigue, ‘Bantu’ philosophy and the extraordinary experience of being in Africa for such a spectacular and unique event. My paperback copy of The Fight runs to nearly 240 pages and this is a must for anyone interested in boxing or Muhammad Ali.

Norman Mailer

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The instruction manuals that are provided with cameras do not usually go into a great deal of detail. Spending a few extra pounds on a comprehensive guide book for a particular model of camera seems like a good investment. For the owner of a Nikon D40 or D40X digital single-lens reflex camera, David Busch’s Digital Field Guide is an excellent choice.

After a ‘Quick Tour’ explaining how to shoot your first picture, review your pictures, correct the exposure and transfer images to a computer, the guide is split into two main sections. Part I is entitled ‘Using the Nikon D40/D40X’ and covers three chapters: Exploring the Nikon D40/D40X, Nikon D40/D40X Essentials, and Setting Up Nikon D40/D40X.

David D. Busch

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In the middle of all the mess behind the Commonwealth Games, it’s nice to have a book that attempts to put the whole thing into perspective and provides facts and figures that are not commonly available. Majumdar and Mehta say that the idea for the book came to them during an auto rickshaw ride in which the driver grumbled that there was a great gap between the Delhi of the Games and the Delhi of the people. The result was a book that gives the Delhi Games a context against the wider picture of the Commonwealth Games and other international Games like the Beijing Olympics.

Boria Majumdar, Commonwealth Games, Nalin Mehta

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What I know about the game of cricket could easily be written on the back of a postage stamp. I do know however, that a cricket commentator once said” The batsman’s Holding, the bowler’s Willy” which I consider (almost) side-splittingly funny. “Batting on the Bosphorus’’ is not quite so funny but it did make me chuckle quietly to myself on plenty of occasions. It’s an account of the summer the young Scotsman travelled the eastern reaches of Europe meeting cricket teams in the most unlikely of settings in the continued hope of scoring his first “international century”.

The premise is that the cricket-mad Bell visited a medium who made several predictions which in combination with a chance thought (the words “Ukraine” and “cricket” popped into his mind) inspired him to surf the net and find out whether his beloved sport was played in eastern Europe. After several months spent e-mailing contacts from Minsk to Istanbul, and working in a methadone programme centre to raise some funds, Bell set off on his adventure.

Angus Bell, cricket

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