26 Books

High school kids Jude and Teddy spend their time in their small Vermont town hanging out, stealing and getting high. On New Year’s Eve 1987, the pair pass out in the snow after a night of drugs, drink and parties. Teddy never wakes up.

Ten Thousand Saints

Eleanor Henderson
Ecco Press 2011, Hardcover, 388 pages, £17.24

Shortly before his death Teddy lost his virginity to Eliza, who was visiting for the night from New York, where her mother is dating Jude’s father. Eliza also gave Teddy cocaine, which may have been the key ingredient in the mixture of substances that killed him. All of this happens in the opening of Henderson’s novel, which deals with the fall-out from Teddy’s death.

Marco Pantani holds the record for the quickest ascent of Alpe d’Huez, perhaps the most famous climb in road cycling. Not only that, but he also holds two of the next four fastest times. What’s sad is that all of these times were, almost certainly, set with the help of EPO, a drug that increases the red blood cell count in an athlete, providing startling increases in endurance.

The Death of Marco Pantani

Matt Rendell
Phoenix 2007, Paperback, 320 pages, £8.99

Among his many honours, he won the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia in the same season, a feat now considered all but impossible. He was the first Italian to win the Tour since the ’60s. But no matter how many impressive exploits I list, nothing will take away the fact that he cheated his entire career.

“Ah, I remember you: you’re the guy who lost the Tour by eight seconds!” – “No monsieur, I’m the guy who won it twice.” Despite winning the world’s greatest cycling race twice, Laurent Fignon is still famous as the man who lost to Greg LeMond by just eight seconds in over three thousand kilometres and 87 hours of racing.

We Were Young and Carefree

Laurent Fignon
Yellow Jersey 2010, Paperback, 304 pages, £12.99

Fignon, who died in 2010, takes the unusual step of recounting the most famous incident of his career at the start of his book with the following anguished words:

Come on, let’s burst the abscess before we really get started. The would has to be left open. Let it bleed away in silence. It will bleed a good while yet.

(There’s more than a hint of Amfortas about that paragraph!) While this decision makes for a more exciting opening than a load of guff about his childhood, it does somewhat hurt the architecture of the story.

David Millar is one of the best cyclists Britain has ever produced. He is also an admitted drug cheat. Although a good percentage of the public assumes that every professional cyclist is a cheat, today the sport is probably cleaner than it’s ever been, and Millar has played a big part in helping it clean itself up.

Racing Through the Dark

David Millar
Orion 2011, Hardcover, 368 pages, £18.99

This is the kind of complicated story that the media doesn’t really like very much, hence the stupid coverage of the possibility of Millar’s lifetime Olympic ban being lifted, something that he has not sought, but which has come about because of a separate legal challenge to the legality of the BOA’s policy of lifetime bans.

Ned Boulting is an irritating bloke who pops up asking stupid and obvious questions of footballers on the telly. Some time ago, he began doing the same thing for the biggest event in cycling: the Tour de France. This book is the story of how he went from knowing nothing  about it to being able to sell a book about knowing nothing about it.

How I Won the Yellow Jumper

Ned Boulting
Yellow Jersey 2011, Paperback, 336 pages, £12.99

I find Boulting’s writing almost unbearable, mainly because it’s exactly like hearing him speak, only it’s directly inside your brain. He’s one of those commentators who loves to point out what to the intellectually lazy seem like portentous parallels between two happenings despite there being no causal relationship at all. You know the kind: “the last time Barcelona played Man United on a Tuesday night, a short man with a bad hair cut scored the winner. Can Nani emulate Messi tonight?” or some shite like that.

Just over six months ago, I started commuting to work by bike again after many years away from the saddle. For some reason, this time was different and I gradually became more and more hooked on riding, gradually metamorphosing from a sedentary public transport user into a lycra-clad road warrior.

It’s All About the Bike

Robert Penn
Penguin 2011, Paperback, 208 pages, £8.99

Before long I was going on reasonably long rides and within six months had completed my first 100 mile sportive. Now, I ride at every opportunity, doing at least 40 miles at the weekend whenever I can get the time. What is it about cycling that’s so addictive? I set out to read as much as I could about this remarkable machine and its aficionados.

In many ways the back-story of this book is more interesting than the book itself. Memoirs of a Master Forger was not written by William Heaney but by Graham Joyce, the author of a string of fantasy novels over the last 20 years. When it was released, in 2008, the author’s true identity was not made public.

Memoirs of a Master Forger

William Heaney
Gollancz 2009, Paperback, 320 pages, £7.99

Some time ago I stumbled across a blog post by Joyce in which he explained that the success of the novel had been somewhat galling. It had better reviews than Joyce’s previous work and went into reprint in its second week – a feat that none of his other books had managed. Joyce wrote: “It confirms some rather worrying trends in publishing.”

Julian Barnes won the Man Booker Prize with this short novel last year. He’s a writer I admire, but mainly because of his wonderful memoir Nothing To Be Afraid Of rather than for his fiction. While his style is beautifully precise, I find the content of his fiction rather bland.

The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes
Jonathan Cape 2011, Hardcover, 160 pages, £12.99

Sadly that is very much the case here. In many ways The Sense of an Ending reminds me of Graham Swift’s horrendously smug and pointless Tomorrow. While it’s not as bad as that, I certainly didn’t enjoy it very much.

Well, I finished The Man Without Qualities, which is more than its author managed to do. Robert Musil died in 1942, aged 61, a mere 21 years after he began writing this mammoth book. The published edition runs to more than 650,000 words and it’s thought that the finished work would have been twice as long. I suspect that Musil would never have finished, even if he had lived until 81, or 101, or 181. The book would just have gone on and on and on.

There isn’t much of a story here. Ulrich, the ‘man without qualities’, is disconnected from life. Having spent time as a poet, a soldier and, more recently, a mathematician, he has come adrift. His father suggests that he take a job as secretary to a count, which leads to his involvement in a committee charged with organising a celebration to mark the Austrian emperor’s 70th anniversary.

The three books here represent three very different approaches to food, but they share a purpose: joy in eating. You might hope that all cookbooks would have that in common, but unfortunately you’d be very wrong.

Exciting Food for Southern Types (Penguin Great Food)

Pellegrino Artusi
Penguin 2011, Paperback, 128 pages, £6.99

Exciting Food For Southern Types is a gourmet’s book. It’s hardly about cooking at all, and the recipes are sketchy and difficult to follow.