Todd Tyrtle
I watched the film for this earlier this month and really enjoyed it and was so excited to see that there was a book to fill in the missing pieces for me. I was not disappointed. Fascinating and inspiring all at once. It makes me want to get out on my own bike and see how hard and how long I can push myself.
What a fascinating book. It has the dubious honour of being the first book I ever put on my “Didn't finish” shelf not because I didn't like it but because it was, in some ways too good.
Too scary, infuriating, upsetting and anxiety inducing for me to continue with. It's also, really sad. I do volunteer work regularly with many folks who are addicted and of course that's upsetting and stressful. (But I'm glad I can help) but reading this just put this at the top of my mind all the time.
But readers better at dealing with this than I will enjoy this I think.
Content of the book was fascinating and really interesting. I learned a lot reading it.
My only criticism is that the e-book version (Kobo, anyway) really needed editing. There were many cases where there was missing punctuation so you had to guess where sentences began and ended based on their capitalization. But every once in a while that was wrong too!
The perfect book at the perfect time. What a great book to read at the end of 2020 with so much hope and relevance. As you can see, I devoured it - I just started it yesterday.
It may not be the most helpful review or make sense to anyone but me, but this book feels like my favourite kind of book. Dreamlike and not always making sense. The Coma by Alex Garland, More than This by Patrick Ness both fall in to this category hugely. And from a totally different genre: Tony Soprano's dreams. In all of these cases I devour the content non-stop. Now I need to find the next one.
I'm a huge fan of mid-century and brutalist architecture and, in fact, even live in a brutalist building myself. I loved the photos - I wish there had been more text and discussion but it certainly whet my appetite for more writing on this subject.
Now, in the midst of the pandemic, though, I'm missing seeing lots of these spaces, particularly some of the iconic indoor spaces mentioned in the book such as Eglinton West station.
Every once in a while I find a book that is so good, so compelling that I find myself reading it in every free minute. While I'm waiting for my eggs to be ready to flip, read a few pages, while I'm in the elevator to switch the laundry from the washer to the dryer, read a few more, while eating dinner, read more, read and read before bed until you are so tired you read the same paragraph six times before finally having to admit, one hour after you normally are asleep, you really can't possibly read any more. A book of this length often takes a week or more for me and this was done in two days. And now I'm sad because it's over and I'll never read it for the first time again and these characters I love will be gone. I'll miss them.
I've been to this part of Scarborough several times, sometimes going to visit the library in the area on a project to visit all of Toronto's libraries. Other times I cycled through the Rouge valley myself. So of course I had a lot of mental images as I read. And now when I ride through there on my bike again part of me will be looking for folks, wondering how they're all doing.
This one's going to be a hard one to follow.
Beautiful writing, but a bit of a slog. Every story was so bleak and without humour or hope. One could say the writing quality was completely my style but the content was not. In most cases I had no sympathy for any of the characters and many of them I actively disliked. I actually cheered when I finished it because now I get to read something happier.
This must be the fourth or fifth time I've re-read it and it seems even more timely. Not just related to the current situation with Coronavirus but the polarization of humans to charismatic leaders, each promoting fear of the others. We may not all be having dreams about our leaders that make us feel an affinity for one or the other, but we're still taking in information - a shared subconscious, if you will, made up not of dreams but of social media posts.
A quick but really enjoyable read. I am always a little reluctant to read books about a cycle race, worried that there will be more focus on physical details: speed, kilometres, difficulty, and not so much on the actual story. However, there was a nice balance between that (which is great in the level that was in this book) and other details about the other, what was on her mind, her history, and so on.
