Matt Seaton, The Escape Artist. Life from the Saddle

This is the book of 2009 so far, and edges ahead of Murakami, which is on a similar theme. Okay, so it's a cycling memoir, but it's more than that. Seaton finds something in the suffering and pain of riding, and tells his story of amateur riding around London in the '90s, along with snippits about his relationship, his kids, and then his wife's cancer and death.

At the end, you know he's learnt something, in an understated way, that uses the doomed attempt to escape the pack in a race as a metaphor; there's even a passage that evokes Bede's account of the sparrow flying, briefly, through the great hall:

Like the bunch, implacable as a swarm of bees, life eventually overhauled me. The game was up. I had found I could not give up cycling, in the way that the phrase implies, with a single, irrevocable act of renunciation. I could only let it go, little by little, like paying out line to a kite which grows ever more distant, until finally the end of the twine slips though one's fingers, and the kite is away, gone on the wind. When it comes, it is an event that feels more like an accident than an exercise of will.

I suspect my brother might know a little about how that happens, especially with kids (albeit perhaps just for a bit). Seaton writes very well, which is a reward in itself, as well as capturing the taciturn comradery of riders, the late 80s and early 90s London (the fear of Nuclear War, the troubles of those on the left or in the Party after 1989), and on why people ride. The final chapter is brilliantly handled. I even liked the use of dashes for reported speech, which seemed apposite for a memoir. I may have to start shaving my legs now. In any case, I went for a ride.