To properly understand Mayor Gregor Robertson’s ongoing bicyclification of Vancouver, I think we need more books like Jon Day’s Cyclogeography: Journeys of a London Bicycle Courier (Notting Hill Editions), an extended essay about “the bicycle in the cultural imagination.” Cyclogeography is an invigorating blend of anecdote (drawn from Day’s years as a London courier) and philosophical musings on cycling, in the course of which Day invokes prominent psychogeographers (Iain Sinclair, Guy Debord) and such cycling heavyweights as Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and William Saroyan. Saroyan contributes the following epiphany on the bicycle as muse (from his 1952 book The Bicycle Rider in Beverly Hills): “I was not yet sixteen when I understood a great deal, from having ridden bicycles for so long, about style, speed, grace, purpose, value, form, integrity, health, humor, music, breathing and finally and perhaps best, of the relationship between the beginning and the end.” Cyclogeography pairs up nicely with David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries (Penguin), which the former Talking Head structures around his experiences cycling in various cities while on tour: Istanbul, Buenos Aires, Berlin and London among them. In the end, though, Bicycle Diaries has more to say about Byrne himself than it does about cycling or cities.