Finished two more books

Last week I finished What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures, and while I was thinking about what I wanted to write here, I dropped right into Speed Secrets II: More Professional Race Driving Techniques and finished that one too. That's three books and we're just starting the third week of the year, so I feel I'm really on track.

First, What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures. This was the latest book by one of my favorite authors, Malcolm Gladwell. I had really enjoyed Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference -- so much so, that I'm planning to reread both sometime this year -- and that meant that I had high hopes for this book as well.

I only wish I had known the kind of book I was reading before I started reading it. While all of his previous three books had an overarching theme that tied all of the stories together, this one did not. This was basically a collection of all the articles he's written for the New Yorker over the years. They are all exceptionally well written, extremely insightful, and a pleasure to read. However, since the book is essentially a collection of short stories, there are many reasons to put the book down and not enough to pick it back up again. As a result, the book ended up being a bit rough to plow through in the space of a week. Had I known ahead of time what I was about to read, I would have spaced it out over the course of several weeks while I continued to read other things, and I would have enjoyed it a lot more.

I do highly recommend it though, as a very casual read that won't feel casual at all.

As for the other book, Speed Secrets 2 is a very specialized book -- it's intended for people who are already successful in racing and want to get that little bit extra that transforms them from a very good driver into one that runs consistently at the front of a very competitive pack. i found it extremely interesting, and I will be spending the next few months on the racetrack trying to apply the lessons and techniques and training exercises described in the book. I'll also use it to help instruct my students that have already mastered the racing line and need "fine tuning" to go faster.

I can't recommend both this book and Speed Secrets: Professional Race Driving Techniques enough. If you're interested at any level in driving a car faster, better, and safer on a race track, these two books provide a really great place to start. The first in the series will take you from being a novice to a very fast skilled driver in a relatively short period of time. Once you've mastered the concepts in the first book, the second really elevates your driving, mainly by focusing on your concentration on expanding the subconscious techniques of interpreting the track and how the car is responding to it. While the first book has a lot of "aha!" moments of "so, that's what I was doing wrong", the second is more about training yourself to become one with the car. Both of these books are going in my race bag, and they'll travel with me to every track day and every day I instruct.