Cafe Within-the-Cafe: The Bookshelf, Revisited

I don’t know exactly why, but ... I just like words. In some ways this site’s roots were only tangentially about cycling and really was just a continuation of my literature studies. Yes, I was a lit major, and not a very accomplished one. Like, at all. The study of literature requires a dedication and focus beyond what regular people OMG A SQUIRREL!!! Where was I?

Oh yeah, literature. There are a lot of ways in which the Podium Cafe came along at the right time — post-Lance (whew!), but meeting the heightened interest in the sport with something there was not enough of: English language chatter. The situation was even more dire if you ventured into a bookstore, where even a solid attempt at a sports section would include a few token works on Cycling, mostly with Armstrong on the cover. By 2006 you could find more online, sportswriter books about a race or series of races with legendary names attached — Sam Abt! John Wilcockson! But the sport was due for a rise in book-length works... and boy did we get it.

I christened the Café Bookshelf in early 2008 as writers like Joe Parkin, Matt Rendell, Jeremy Whittle and Richard Moore saw their works break through in the US, even without Lance in the title. I started writing book reviews — something no other English website seemed to catch on to, and before long, I got an offer from a fella in Dublin, by the handle “fmk,” who shared my love of cycling books and writing about them. And the Cafe Bookshelf became what it is today: the most comprehensive assembly of in-depth Cycling book reviews, in English at least.

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I shouldn’t love reading about sports as much as I do, right? It wasn’t something I admitted to my lit profs, but when I was a bored and kinda lonely tween, following a move to a new town, I started haunting the public library, not for great works of literature but fun, readable sports books. Older me would undoubtedly turn his nose up at the one about the injured kid who threw the touchdown, or the other injured kid who hit the big home run (I am totally imagining what these books were actually about because... it doesn’t matter). Mixed in were a few biographies of great ball sports legends. They were fun reads and met up with my sports-obsessed imagination. I didn’t need any help or permission or even a device charger to pass a reasonably fun afternoon. So while I grew all the way from there into collegiate-level study of literature, and developed a fondness for a well-crafted sentence, I had no reservations about signing up for a senior-level seminar entitled American Sports Fiction.

Top Five Books from my American Sports Fiction Class:

1. Shoeless Joe
2. The Dixie Association
3. The Natural
4. The Celebrant
5. The Universal Baseball Association Inc., Henry J. Waugh Prop.

I think we read something that wasn’t about baseball, but I don’t remember. Anyway, because I felt some regret after graduation about not being a better student of literature, I would often read about other books, with the New York Review of Books or New York Times book review section the two best ways to geek out on literature without actually consuming (or, gasp! generating) anything of note. This introduced me to the book review as an art form — where the writer went beyond talking about the book, to introducing the context in which it should be considered. A review of a book on post-war Vietnam, for example, would consist of a not-insignificant discussion of the history before even turning to the book, possibly after the jump.

I don’t know when I first attempted to reproduce this format, emphasizing contextual discussion before turning to the red meat, but I do remember trying it to some degree, and I distinctly remember chatting over email about this with that “fmk” fellow, known to you all now by his real name, Feargal McKay. We agreed that this approach made the reviews worth doing, versus droning out some basic points about the book and giving it a thumbs-up or down. Feargal was committed to book reviews well beyond my abilities and over time, with occasional exceptions, he took it off my hands. What resulted was the Cafe Bookshelf as it now stands, in all its comprehensive glory... and plenty of time for me to geek out on the Giro d’Italia parcours and the like.

I am profoundly grateful to Feargal for his great, very substantive work, and his dedication to the craft. His reviews were exactly what I’d envisioned, a room of their own within the Cafe, complementing the site while also representing a stand-alone thing... a presence. I felt compelled to write this post because no effort to look back at what we did would be sufficient otherwise.

Seven Books I am Going To Buy Because of Feargal’s Reviews:

1. Dear Hugo, Herbie Sykes’ fictional tribute to Hugo Koblet.
2. Sprinting Through No Man’s Land, about the 1919 Tour.
3. End to End, riding from Land’s End to John O’Groats.
4. Riding in the Zone Rouge, another post-WW1 book.
5. The Ascent, about the rise of Irish Cycling.
6. Anquetil, Alone whose title says it all.
7. Cycling’s World Championships, The Inside Story! How can you go wrong?

Some fun facts!

1. Our very own Majope is a published author. She had her pet causes around here early on, and one of them was a
2. Feargal is a published author, and I got to write a review of his first work, The Complete Book of the Tour de France. (Emphasis on “first.”)
3. I wrote a book (self-published), called For the Love of the Cobbles, and Feargal wrote a review of it.
4. I will confess, I picked nits in my review of his book not because I had any real concerns — as I said then, if you want one book on 100 editions of the Tour which would spark your interest in just about any of the 100 editions (then) that merited interest, this book was a perfect gateway drug to a... I dunno, rabbit hole doesn’t do it justice. Maybe prairie dog town? Anyway, I believed (and still do) that Feargal would not have respected any review of his book that was all positive. They don’t call it “literary criticism” for nothing.

So that is the story of the Cafe Bookshelf. When this site gets turned off in a few weeks, the Bookshelf will remain just that, a series of posts sitting on their virtual shelf, available to read for some undetermined length of time. Please keep enjoying Feargal’s work and the work of our other occasional reviewers.

Chris’ Five Favorite Books about Cycling:

1. Dino Buzzati, Giro d’Italia. The best cycling book ever. Don’t make me implore you again.
2. Richard Moore, In Search of Robert Millar. Review here. Moore was a beloved personage in the cycling world via the Cycling Podcast, and his charm comes through in this personal journey. Slaying the Badger is his greatest work.
3. Herbie Sykes, Eagle of the Canavese. The story of a double Giro champ not well known, Franco Balmamion. All of Sykes’ works are worthwhile.
4. William Fotheringham, Fallen Angel. The Coppi story. Both Fotheringhams are prolific biographers of the sport.
5. Matt Rendell, The Death of Marco Pantani. Rendell is a must-read.