What are the best books about cycling?
Start with The Rider by Tim Krabbé, a short Dutch novel from 1978 that lives inside one road race and is the cycling book other cycling books get compared to. Then read Paul Fournel's Need for the Bike for small, funny reflections on riding, and Tim Moore's French Revolutions or Gironimo! for long-distance comedy.
Most cycling books are about bikes, kit or professionals. The ones worth keeping are about the experience of riding: the suffering, the scenery, the private comedy of a person on two wheels trying to get up a hill. Here are four that understand that, from a cult novel to a pair of gloriously unwise journeys.
The Rider, Tim Krabbé (1978)
Krabbé, a Dutch writer who also raced as an amateur cyclist and is a serious chess player, first published De renner in 1978; Sam Garrett's English translation appeared in 2002. The book is built around a single one-day race in the mountains of southern France, the Tour de Mont Aigoual, and the race report keeps breaking off into digressions and flights of fancy before snapping back to the road.
It is short, well under two hundred pages, and it has become a cult classic. Matt Seaton, writing in The Guardian, suggested nothing better was ever likely to be written about the inner experience of racing a bike.
Read it if: you have ever chased a wheel, or wondered why anyone would.
Need for the Bike, Paul Fournel (2001)
Fournel is a French writer and, at the time of the translation, a cultural attaché in Cairo. Besoin de vélo was published by Éditions du Seuil in 2001 and translated into English by Allan Stoekl for the University of Nebraska Press. It is a book of short reflective pieces about cycling as a way of life: what makes it absurd, what makes it meaningful, and the sounds, smells and language of riding in mountains and cities.
It includes some very funny stories, among them a country doctor who declined to anaesthetise a young Fournel after a bike injury. Each piece is short enough to read over a coffee stop.
Read it if: you like your cycling with a little French philosophy and not much sweat.
French Revolutions and Gironimo!, Tim Moore (2001 and 2014)
Tim Moore, a British travel writer and humourist, is the comedian of the bunch. French Revolutions, subtitled Cycling the Tour de France, is his book about taking on the Tour's route. Years later, in Gironimo! Riding the Very Terrible 1914 Tour of Italy, he goes further back: in 2012 he re-rode the notoriously difficult 1914 Giro d'Italia on a period bicycle, in a reproduction period outfit.
These are travel books first and cycling books second, written by a humourist, and that is the point. Gironimo! has the added pull of Italy and a century-old race, which makes it a natural holiday read.
Read it if: you want to laugh, or you need reassurance that your own long rides are going better than his.
Which one first?
- For the purist: The Rider.
- For dipping into: Need for the Bike.
- For laughs and Italy: Gironimo!
FAQ
Is The Rider fiction or a true story?
It is published as a novel, though Krabbé was himself a competitive cyclist, and it reads with the authority of someone who has been there. Treat it as fiction drawn from a racer's experience.
Are these books about professional racing?
No. The Rider stays inside one rider's head, Fournel writes about everyday riding, and Moore is cheerfully unprofessional. That is a large part of their charm.
Do you need to cycle to enjoy them?
Not really. The Rider works as a tense short novel and Moore's books as comic travel writing. Fournel is the one that will mean most to people who ride.
Is Tim Krabbé known for anything else?
Yes. His 1984 novel Het gouden ei became the film The Vanishing (Spoorloos), and he is known for his writing about chess.
Sources
Written by the Zestasy editors. General information for curious adults, not medical, nutrition or training advice.