Books about bicycles or cycling recommended over the years on Five Books.
“The mountains in cycling, in competitive racing, hold a particularly prominent position. In grand tours like the Tour de France, it’s the mountains that separate the overall contenders, the people who are apt to win the race from everyone else…But Higher Calling is not just a book about climbing or climbers, it’s also about the continental European mountains. Leonard does this beautifully. He opens the book with the snow being cleared on this mountain pass and closes the book with it being snowed in again. This road is only available for a very limited number of months during peak summer so there is this finite temporal element to it. Riding on these roads, he is a reflective enough person to raise the basic question, ‘Why is this road even here?’ So, very quickly, you see concrete and battlements from World War II. You unpack the history of the Alps as a border between France and Italy going back to the Napoleonic Wars, when many of these roads that were initially dirt tracks were paved or became passable.” Read more...
James Hibbard, Sportspersons & Sportswriter
“End to End is about cycling from Land’s End to John O’Groats in Scotland as a timed exercise. It’s the entire length of the UK and the men’s record is somewhere in the neighborhood of just over 40 hours, the women’s record is just over 50. What Paul Jones does in the book is tie together really elegantly a personal narrative about what cycling means to him and mental health with the stories of a fair number of athletes who have tackled this end-to-end record stretching back 100 years…I don’t want to understate Paul Jones’s ability to write a beautiful sentence. He’s very concerned with the idea of journeys shaping meaning, and questions that I’m very interested in as well. Basic questions of not just life on a bike, but life itself. Why is this so painful? What does this pain have to teach me physically, emotionally, and so on—he does an amazing job on that front.” Read more...
James Hibbard, Sportspersons & Sportswriter
“I read Camus before reading The Rider, but as soon as I read The Rider, I thought, ‘this is the cycling novel that Camus would have written.’ It’s an incredible piece of writing. I think that among most cycling aficionados, it’s ranked as the most literary and most highly regarded cycling novel—to the point where it has perhaps blotted out other interesting writing on the sport.” Read more...
James Hibbard, Sportspersons & Sportswriter
“It’s a history book, but it very much runs to the present, even including currently active African American and Afro-British riders. It’s very, very interesting on what has been done in terms of discrimination and how to redress it to make cycling more accessible socio-economically and culturally. What prompted him to write this book was the promise of the 2012 Velodrome being built in East London, ostensibly hoping for more access for historically underprivileged communities in the sport of cycling, and some frustration with how that failed to fully manifest in the years after the 2012 Olympic Games.” Read more...
James Hibbard, Sportspersons & Sportswriter
“What is really compelling about this book is that she gets the landscape of London right. She accomplishes beautiful literary writing, that really captures this idea that when you’re on a bicycle, a city is not mediated…She’s not a racer, she’s got a job to do. She’s got deadlines, she’s walking up to office buildings and delivering blueprints and plans. It’s very much a specific cycling subculture that she taps into, with this aim of describing her affinity for London and this proximal access to a city that you’re granted by being on a bike that you miss out on in any other form of conveyance.” Read more...
James Hibbard, Sportspersons & Sportswriter
The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels
by James Hibbard
James Hibbard, a former American professional cyclist, threads together the story of his cycling career, a road trip, and philosophy, which he studied and looked to for answers, but found inadequate. "Thinking, when divorced from the physicality of our existence, fails, " he says, "I very much felt that it failed me."
“Many congested cities around the world have been experimenting with bicycles as a solution, with public electric bike and scooter schemes making lots of European cities much easier and more fun to get around. As I biked across Rome, Italy, late one night this summer to catch the train back to my childhood home in Frascati—the wind in my hair and without even breaking a sweat—I said to myself, ‘This is it! This is the answer to life, the universe and everything!’ Reading Two Wheels Good by American journalist Jody Rosen was a robust antidote to my euphoric bicycle moment. It’s not only a history of the bicycle but a history of our attitudes to bicycles, both for and against. The current bike craze is only one of many since Karl van Drais unveiled his Laufsmachine in Mannheim, Germany, in 1817 and I still seem to spend more time in my car stuck in traffic than on my bike.” Read more...
Nonfiction of 2022: Fall Roundup
Sophie Roell, Journalist
“Flann O’Brien is very good at the combination of the familiar and the horrifying” Read more...
The Best Cycling Books, recommended by James Hibbard
As a professional cyclist, James Hibbard looked to philosophy to provide some of the answers he was looking for. He describes that quest in his book, The Art of Cycling. Here, he shares some of his own favourite cycling books, from the best cycling novel to the true story of cyclists who aim to ride the entire length of the United Kingdom in 40 hours. These are books that you don’t need to be a professional cyclist or die-hard fan to appreciate.
