Roughly in the order they influenced us – newer influences towrds the bottom.
I don't think it's coincidence that most of them are published by Microcosm, Microcosm has some pretty cool stuff.
This one made us consider that cycling might be something that we want to try. Despite the city traffic being scary. Despite all our cycling memories being awkward at best. Elly's story of riding into a wall because distracted made us think that we're not so different from those cool bike people. We are also very distracted. We're very glad we started cycling.
I'm not even sure if we were already cycling when we read this. We definitely weren't considering ourself a bike person. We were intrigued, but scared and defensive, like we weren't cool enough to have any more than practical relationship to cycling. This book was so touching and made us yearn for the feelings. We really wanted to be Bike Queers in the softest sense of that word.
This one is really fucking good. It's about many, many things that are related to racism in bicycle activism. It helped us better understand what is happening when people talk about cycling in certain ways. Who the implied cyclist is, which goals are seen as more important than others. What stuck most with us was how sometimes a new bike path can be an act of gentrification, and how neither "just act like a car" nor "completely separate bike traffic from car traffic" do much to adress the various forms of violence and inequality that shape our use of public space.
We've read too many people talking about their bike tours in terms of length, speed, equipment and conversational skills. And it's never "eh, we don't go far and we're pretty slow, we have the most ok equipment we could afford, and uh yes we often manage to talk to people when it is necessary, also we had a small amount of really nice conversations". So we were incredibly relieved to pick up a bike tour book that feels a little closer to my reality. There's a lot of exhaustion and arguing and pain, and we felt really sorry for those two a lot, while we were also really glad to be following their journey.