Following on the recommendation of the guy at the New York Times who's training to ride one of this year's toughest Tour de France stages, I picked up a copy of The Rider, a novella by the Dutch writer (and serious cyclist) Tim Krabbé. I finished the book last night, and, ladies and gentlemen, I can't recommend it enough. This is a fantastic book - mostly the first-person tale, told by "Tim Krabbé," of a 140-km race in the mid-1970s. Granting that the book is only 130-some pages, I read it in two long sittings that cumulated to about the same time as it takes the narrator to finish the race - a neat little trick.
As a "cycling book," it definitely has its appeal to serious riders (a category that hardly includes me) and those interested in the Tour de France (a category that does include me). Cycling names and events figure prominently in the story, which means really getting the story requires Wikipedia or a good history of the Tour. But aside from that, The Rider uses just enough literary experimentation to tell a gripping story: the race is narrated mostly kilometer by kilometer until the final pages, which are told centimeter-by-centimeter. This works because Krabbé is an excellent writer, and the translation is believably good. An especially great, self-aggrandizing and self-mocking line which resonates with my own current training: "Coppi, Bartali, Lebusque, Kléber, I've never felt their pain, I'm the only rider in the world whose pain I've ever felt; that makes me a pretty unique individual."
(You should, of course, acquire this book through your local bookseller, not one of those big companies. The Carleton bookstore got the book into my hands in about the same time it would have taken Amazon.com to get it to me, without levying any S&H charges, and with a nice personal touch: the bookbuyer also got a copy as a Father's Day gift to her husband, a serious amateur rider.)