26 Books

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.

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.

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.

Ron Jaworski was an NFL quarterback for more than 15 years. He spent the bulk of his career with the Philadelphia Eagles and took them to their first Super Bowl. These days he is an analyst on Monday Night Football.

The Games That Changed the Game

Ron Jaworski
ESPN Books 2011, Paperback, 312 pages, £10.22

In this book, Jaworski looks at seven NFL games that he believes represent important moments in the tactical development of the sport. He gives the background to the coaches and players involved and then examines the film of the game to explain how the tactical innovation in question played out.

This is one of those books that feels like a good, long magazine article that has been expanded beyond the range of the material. Other examples include The Long Tail, Freakonomics and anything by Malcolm Gladwell. Indeed, Gladwell is probably the apotheosis of the form: his books feel like over-extended articles; his articles feel like over-extended anectdotes.

Super Crunchers

Ian Ayres
John Murray 2008, Paperback, 272 pages, £9.99

Ayres at least has an interesting story to tell. The rise in the practice of analysing large data sets is changing the way many areas of our lives work, from finance to medicine, shopping to wine criticism. These changes are profound and although they will help us to make better decisions, they will also make a lot of people uncomfortable, not least those who consider themselves experts.

The only Le Carre books I had read, before this one, were his classics from the 60s and 70s: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and the Smiley Trilogy. This is a more recent work, which deals with the espionage world as it today, with the Cold War a distant memory and terrorism the new threat.

A Most Wanted Man

John le Carré
Sceptre 2009, Paperback, 384 pages, £8.99

When Issa Karpov, a young Chechen with links to Islamist terrorists, arrives in Hamburg, he immediately draws the interest of the intelligence services. The Germans are keen to erase memories their failure to detect the Hamburg-based group that plotted the September 11 attacks on the US. They want better intelligence sources to help spot future plots.