My last recommended reading, Jim Holt’s Why Does the World Exist? was a bit austere. If you want to see how to live, try In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor. This may look like an orgy of anglophilia and snobbery, and the two correspondents are very British, and do live versions of the high life. But they are so spirited, sunny and zestfully hard-working that there is enjoyment on every page. 

If I knew how to ride, I imagine a good ride would be like this.