I searched and only found this thread on Kris Holm’s book: Kris Holm's Book - Thoughts and Discussion Thread
What other books and media are good for unicyclists to have, from beginner to advanced?
I’d always recommend some good Russian literature. Tolstoy is quite easy reading in a decent translation and is a good place to start.
Yes, Tolstoy is good, but if you want to read something from Russia that’s more relevant to unicycling, try Lenin’s State and Revolution. That’ll get your wheel rolling!
Luno sounds like Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries, but on one wheel! Awesome!
Books everyone should read once in their life: “Nineteen eighty-four” by George Orwell, “All quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque.
Seriously though, there are few really helpfull books on unicycling out there. The Kris Holm is the best one I have seen so far.
All Quiet on the Western Front? Yeah, the Nazis used to burn that one!
By George Orwell, I like Homage to Catalonia.
Just after the restoration of capitalism in East Germany, Sebastian Höher wrote a good book on unicycling. It describes how to ride backwards and so on, but in most ways, this forum is far more useful than that book could ever be- not just because it is more recent and the sport has evolved a lot, but also in terms of sheer volume of information provided. The unicyclists who’ve posted stuff here, and their combined years of experience and different areas of expertise- I can’t think of a way that any book on unicycling could even come close.
I have Kris Holm’s book, and am waiting for a couple of other ones to arrive in the mail.
Kris Holm‘s book is also the only relevant book on unicycling I know. What I‘m wondering is, if there are any magazines about unicycling or magazines that regularily have articles about our sport.
At the moment I find this forum to be by far „the best read“ on unicyclism.
Every beginner ought to have “How to Ride Your Unicycle” by Charlie Dancey:
https://www.unicycle.uk.com/accessories/books-videos-and-dvds/unicycle-books/how-to-ride-your-unicycle.html
And “Bears on Wheels”, which I discovered 15 years or so ago via a thread in this very forum, is well worth a read:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bears-Wheels-Bright-Early-Book/dp/039480967X
Vivolo’s ride the unicycle course crashed into my mailbox today.
How to ride your Unicycle should be Dancey-ing in soon.
Bears and Wheels? A kids counting book? Something worthwhile in it, seriously?
The KH bible is all you need.
Although, another vote for “Bears on wheels”.
“Bears on Wheels” teaches counting. Highly recommended to anyone referring to a unicycle as a “bike”.
A classic, but you may not have “read” it recently. The book never uses the words unicycle or bike! In fact it’s not real big on words.
I haven’t read it but I considered buying it a while ago – I didn’t because it would have probably ended up in the rather large pile of unread books I have accumulated over the years, basically due to lack of time.
For me at least, Amazon’s UK site seemed to have more pages available in the “Look Inside” than the US site. It isn’t a big book and quite a lot of it is/was available to browse (at least for a while), so you can see what you are letting yourself in for mathematically (it seems to have all of Chapters 1 and 2). Google books also has it but again not so many pages as the Amazon UK “Look Inside”. That said, when I went back to look at it again I couldn’t see nearly as much as I did the first time (basically just the first chapter now – the maths starts in ch2)…
Two years ago, there was a post on this forum that described a unicycle and rider as a “bimodal double pendulum.” This sounds correct, but I am not a scientist or engineer, so I don’t really know. I guess reading this book would be the way for me to figure it out.
Here are links to a couple of papers by the first author of the book (Michał Niełaczny) which seem to be freely available as pdfs. You can get an idea of what to expect in the book (from 2014 and 2016).
Thanks for the links fetzenschorsch and DrD. I have a graduate degree in mathematics and this is heavy stuff to me, but also interesting. What’s missing from those two papers and also from the book previews is any kind of introduction to the Boltzmann-Hamel equations.
(This Georg Hamel character is new to me but Wikipedia says his doctoral adviser was David Hilbert, which gets my respect.)
Here’s 14 pages on Boltzmann-Hamel, around the same number of pages as the Niełaczny et al book devotes to it judging by the table of contents:
If you don’t deeply love calculus and differential equations, it’s possible that this won’t be your thing. 