White Heat: The Extreme Skiing Life, Lonely Planet: Beijing Encounterand Rough Guide to Beijing.
White Heat: The Extreme Skiing Life
Wayne Johnson
Simon & Schuster, £12.99 in UK
Extreme skiing is not exactly a tourist activity, especially in Ireland, where our mountains are a tad ambitiously named. But a few chapters of this book should have you checking out those last-minute offers to slopes around the world. Johnson, who is also a novelist, spends his weekends doing volunteer emergency work for the National Ski Patrol in Utah, and this is his love affair with white slopes put into words. It is a world of 120km/h runs on vertiginous slopes, 140m jumps, skiers who careen down mountainsides before flipping off the edge and releasing a parachute at the last low-altitude second, and rescue crews who spend their days blowing up snow to make slopes avalanche-proof.
If this heady, vertigo- inducing mix doesn't get you on to a ski lift, then a few episodes of Ski Sunday should seal the deal.
Lonely Planet: Beijing Encounter
Eilís Quinn
Lonely Planet, £6.99 in UK
Rough Guide to Beijing Simon Lewis
Rough Guides, £12.99 in UK
If spectator sports are more your thing, then what could be better than a trip to the Olympics in Beijing? Plenty of publishers are refreshing their city guides in the run-up to the games, including Lonely Planet, which is publishing a Beijing guide as part of its Encounters series. This is a pocket-sized book with a handy fold-out map, plenty of pictures and easy-to-flick-through colour coding. A more in-depth, if pricey, alternative is The Rough Guide to Beijing. The layout is more conservative, but this is much more substantial, with reams of background information. Both are a bit thin on the Olympics, though, with just a few pages about the world's biggest sporting event.