With the summer holidays upon us, it's time to think about books to read en vacances. If you're like me, it's a chance to catch up on some novels, always better read with momentum than crawled through three pages at a time last thing after Newsnight. For cyclists, recent years have seen a renaissance of bike-writing, as well as bike-riding. So if you're thinking of stowing a bit of bike-lit in your saddlebag, allow me to make a few recommendations – and list some cycling books still on my "must read" list.
Because the Tour de France has just come to an end, let's start with sport. Richard Williams signed off his superb coverage of the event this year with this:
"With the end of the Tour de France," the novelist Paul Fournel wrote, "the summer reaches its moment of sadness: long, hot afternoons and no longer anything to get your teeth into."
More of Fournel in a moment, but there are plenty of books around to prolong the racing fan's contentment. For starters, Mark Cavendish has produced an autobiography almost as quickly as he finished the stage on the Champs Elysées. I can't tell you much about the quality of Boy Racer, other than to say I received an email from a former pro I know who was none too happy about Cav's off-the-cuff comments about him in the book, but I have heard that, as these things go, it's well-ghosted.
A better prospect might be Bradley Wiggins's In Pursuit of Glory, famously frank about its author's post-Olympic depression and fondness for a bevvy. Talking of pursuing glory, Michael Hutchinson's account of his quixotic attempt on one of cycling's great athletic challenges, The Hour, remains a cracking read.
The stars of yesteryear have reappeared too. For nostalgics, Cycling is My Life, the autobiography of erstwhile British hero Tommy Simpson, who died on Mont Ventoux in 1967 from the combined effects of dehydration, excessive effort, brandy and amphetamines, has been reissued. Of the competing accounts of the life of his great rival and five-times Tour winner of the 1960s, Jacques Anquetil, I would choose Fallen Angel by William Fotheringham (a Guardian cycling correspondent and author) over Paul Howard's rather luridly titled Sex, Lies and Handlebar Tape.
Another by a Guardian and Observer scribe, Richard Moore's In Search of Robert Millar, is well regarded and very much on my shopping list. Interestingly, his subject, the enigmatic Scottish climber Millar, whose feat of 4th place in the 1984 Tour de France as best-ever British finisher was only this year matched by Wiggins, has recently emerged from semi-recluse to write, rather brilliantly, about his racing experience in a recent issue of the upmarket cycling periodical Rouleur. Rouleur also interviewed and excerpted a book by Jean Bobet, brother and fellow professional of the great Breton champion Louison. The extracts read beautifully and left me wanting more of Tomorrow, We Ride: the pick of the bunch, possibly.
I'm not a big fan of travel writing generally, and of cycling travel writing especially, as it only makes me envious that I'm not out doing it myself. But I might bring myself to re-read Tim Moore's French Revolutions, as he is such a funny and charming writer. More off the beaten track but a great companion would be Ken Worpole, in his quiet way one of our great public intellectuals and a beautiful writer; so try his Staying Close to the River, and you will not go far wrong. And there is always the indomitable Dervla Murphy to fall back on. Her Full Tilt: From Dunkirk to Delhi by Bicycle stayed with me for its account of sleeping with a pistol under her pillow each night as she pedalled her way through Turkey.
Another classic, making the transition from travelogue now to fiction, is HG Wells's obscure novel The Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll. Admittedly, it's more memorable for sociological reasons – its portrait of a "New Woman" – than for great literary merit. But I couldn't end without two literary cycling favourites. Tim Krabbé might be better-known for his noirish thrillers, The Vanishing and The Cave, but in his native Netherlands, it is The Rider that has outsold the lot. A novella-cum-memoir, superlatively translated by Sam Garrett, The Rider is an account of a one-day race that takes its reader on an extraordinary existentialist journey.
Rather like Krabbé, who is also a chess expert, the French diplomat and author Paul Fournel delights in intellectual puzzles – hence his membership of the avant-garde writing group Oulipo, which has counted Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec among its number. But his short book of pensées, Need for the Bike, is not a test but a delight: a more articulate testament to the pleasures of cycling is hard to imagine.
I've barely got going, but please tell us what cycling read you'll be packing in your pannier this year.
• Matt Seaton is the author of the book Two Wheels, a revised and updated collection of his Two Wheels column for the Guardian
