Gord (who is once again, faster than me) tweeted the existence of Krabbésday, which is the day of the actual race that inspired Tim Krabbé to write The Rider.
That book is a classic of modern Dutch literature, and of cycling books, it must be the finest fiction (even if it is barely fiction) ever written. It may simply be the best work of cycling literature ever, though on that front it may be duelling with shop manuals, and I'm not willing to decide the argument in favor of fiction.
I would go further. I would simply say it is a first-rate novel, easily among the best I have read. It is too easy for me to read a story told about my own favorite hobby and declare it great because I understand the stories. I would argue that Krabbé is both evocative and stylish (at least in translation) in ways that are impressive in a cycling-naïve context.
What I'm saying is, is that it's a good book and you ought to read it.
Comments
Fiction vs. Shop Manuals?
Hmmm.... so you're saying that you don't want to prioritize between the value-added contribution to your general well-being by being able to keep your bicycle well kept (shop manuals) and the contribution to your overall soul and inner spirit by reading non-online stuff (literature)? I find that choice hard to make too, since both of them offer different contributions... :)
Shop Manuals as Fiction
Mostly, I want to keep literature in its place.
I'm snarky about it, but I think that fans of literature as a group are quite enthusiastic about overestimating the importance of fiction (unacknowledged legislators and all that rot), and routinely underestimate how much more their world has been transformed by men in sheds, as James May put it.
The bicycle is a specific, interesting example: there is a well-hashed theory that the bicycle, by lowering the cost of personal transportation (it replaced the horse, more or less) instigated much of the social upheaval of the late 19th century and the early 20th century. It's also fairly well established that the first proponents of good roads in North America were cyclists, and if nothing else, they literally paved the way for cars.
So here we have a couple of engineering developments that had no per se social motivations, whiggish, progressive, or otherwise, and yet they more or less completely transformed social customs in our culture (with a little help from that other engineering development, birth control).
I'd be wrong if I claimed that social and political movements (the province of poets and abstract ideas, if you will, though this is a bit unfair to unpoetical creators of abstract ideas) didn't have effects, because those, too, have been massive in their own ways. And also, I have badly entangled (confused, even) the ideas of poetry, rhetoric, and abstract ideas, which probably don't deserve such ill treatment, so I shall stop now.
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