After reading the sterling reviews of "The Race", I just ordered it from Amazon, My family is going to France in 3 wks for LeTour, and my son insists on riding L'Alp Duez. I also ordered "The Long Season" for the plane ride. Has anyone read this book and have a review?

After reading the sterling reviews of "The Race", I just ordered it from Amazon, My family is going to France in 3 wks for LeTour, and my son insists on riding L'Alp Duez. I also ordered "The Long Season" for the plane ride. Has anyone read this book and have a review?
Here are my favorite cycling novels and essays, in order of how much I like them, from best to worst:

The Rider, by Tim Krabbé: Written in a very literary and literate style. The best writing about cycling ever. The entire book covers the course of a race at one page per kilometer, from the point of view of the rider. It's nonfiction: Krabbé really raced cycles and now there's an annual "Ronde van Tim Krabbé (http://www.imagesportmarketing.nl/rondevantimkrabbe/)" to celebrate this book. The quality of the writing and the writer's insights are head-and-shoulders above anything else I've read about cycling.

 
Besoin de Vélo (translated into English as Need for the Bike) by Paul Fournel: This is a strange and wonderful book. Each chapter is a separate reflection on the role of cycling in the author's life. Fournel is celebrated as a member of the experimental writing collective Oulipo (he's been the President of Oulipo for the past year), but this book is written in a more straightforward narrative style and is quite accessible. It's very funny and wise and you'll find yourself boring your spouse or lover by reading too much of it aloud because it's irresistable to share Fournel's witticisms and observations.

 
The Long Season: I really liked this book. The author is very honest and eloquent in describing his state of mind as he spends a year focusing on catting up to 2 and neglecting his school work and his girlfriend. Nothing profound, but well written and engaging.

 
The Yellow Jersey: Not terribly well written, but a good yarn nonetheless. The protagonist is a complete jerk when he's off the bike, so the author has to work extra hard to keep the reader from throwing the book across the room in disgust (I was particularly offended by the narrator's idiom of referring to women by the pronoun "it" instead of "she"), but when it comes to racing, the writing will put you on the rivet. Unlike The Race, the characters have some real flesh to them, so they hold your interest, and the plot is unpredictable.

 
The Race: Perhaps I'm missing something because everyone else loves this book, but I thought it was pretty lame. The plot is a standard issue, paint-by-numbers bildungsroman appropriate teenage readers, but not really meaty enough for adults. All the characters are either good or bad---there's no real moral ambiguity or complexity. The plot is completely predictable, so once you figure out who the good guys and the bad guys are, there is no suspense. The fact that the plot is not plausible doesn't help.The way everything wraps up neatly involves far too many twists that are simply not believable in real-world pro racing.

The cycling sections are nothing special. All of the books I list above are much better at describing bike racing from the point of view of the rider. The Yellow Jersey does a much more believable job of describing the same sort of ups and downs of a domestique thrust into the limelight at the TdF than The Race does.

The book was not even proofread carefully. There are countless typos and grammatical errors. I would not recommend this book.

Here are my favorite cycling novels and essays, in order of how much I like them, from best to worst:

The Rider, by Tim Krabbé: Written in a very literary and literate style. The best writing about cycling ever. The entire book covers the course of a race at one page per kilometer, from the point of view of the rider. It's nonfiction: Krabbé really raced cycles and now there's an annual "Ronde van Tim Krabbé (http://www.imagesportmarketing.nl/rondevantimkrabbe/)" to celebrate this book. The quality of the writing and the writer's insights are head-and-shoulders above anything else I've read about cycling.

 
Besoin de Vélo (translated into English as Need for the Bike) by Paul Fournel: This is a strange and wonderful book. Each chapter is a separate reflection on the role of cycling in the author's life. Fournel is celebrated as a member of the experimental writing collective Oulipo (he's been the President of Oulipo for the past year), but this book is written in a more straightforward narrative style and is quite accessible. It's very funny and wise and you'll find yourself boring your spouse or lover by reading too much of it aloud because it's irresistable to share Fournel's witticisms and observations.

 
The Long Season: I really liked this book. The author is very honest and eloquent in describing his state of mind as he spends a year focusing on catting up to 2 and neglecting his school work and his girlfriend. Nothing profound, but well written and engaging.


 
The Race: Perhaps I'm missing something because everyone else loves this book, but I thought it was pretty lame. The plot is a standard issue, paint-by-numbers bildungsroman appropriate teenage readers, but not really meaty enough for adults. All the characters are either good or bad---there's no real moral ambiguity or complexity. The plot is completely predictable, so once you figure out who the good guys and the bad guys are, there is no suspense. The fact that the plot is not plausible doesn't help.The way everything wraps up neatly involves far too many twists that are simply not believable in real-world pro racing.
.



Just ordered these for books from Amazon ($41.23 shipped). Already have the Yellow Jersey (loved it and argee with the assessment of the main character).

Thanks for the tip!

Ed

After reading the sterling reviews of "The Race", I just ordered it from Amazon, My family is going to France in 3 wks for LeTour, and my son insists on riding L'Alp Duez. I also ordered "The Long Season" for the plane ride. Has anyone read this book and have a review?

I both liked and disliked "The Long Season." The character spends alot of time zipping and unzipping his jersey, and pedaling into the fog, hills, whatever. The chapters about Cat 3 racing were great. The Chapters summerizing the 1995 Tour stages were well written, but brought nothing more than watching the tour video. While there were some useful parallels between the tour and his own racing, in the end, they Tour chapters got in the way of the story. Wished he had talked more about his relationships with his riding buddies.
He's good writer, but perhaps the story needed more bones, or he did not delve deep enough. Fun to try to figure out what roads he is talking about, as he writes about the area that I ride.

My family is going to France in 3 wks for LeTour, and my son insists on riding L'Alp Duez.
You and your son might enjoy Graeme Fife's Tour de France: The History, The Legend, The Riders. As well as presenting a good history of Le Tour, Fife begins each section with a narrative of riding a major climb from a Tour stage (as a tourist, not a racer). You and your son might enjoy comparing your experiences to Fife's descriptions of climbing L'Alpe d'Huez, Le Galibier, Ventoux, etc.

Fife can be obnoxious when he tries to tell the reader that Indurain and Armstrong are not great tour riders because they lack the class of Merckx, Anquetil, Coppi, and Hinault (he sneers at Armstrong as uncouth for his gesture in sitting up and letting Pantani take the stage win at Ventoux in 2000 and he denigrates Indurain for doing the minimum necessary to win instead of blowing the field away with constant attacks in the manner of Merckx), but for the most part the book would make a great companion piece as you follow the tour.