Tim Moore's French Revolutions is one of the best introductions to the scale and ambition of Le Tour from a cyclist's point of view as he retells the experience of riding all 3,630km of one year's route. Ned Boulting's brilliantly idiosyncratic How I Won the Yellow Jumper is his own inside story on how most of us follow the race, via the ITV coverage. The Tour de France to the Bitter End is a superlative collection of race reports from the Guardian beginning in 1903 to almost right up to the present with the Bradley Wiggins victory in 2012. Before Wiggins in terms of British riders the essential reference point was the story of the brilliant, yet tragic, Tommy Simpson. A career detailed in William Fotheringham's Put Me Back on My Bike. Richard Moore's Slaying the Badger is the classic account of a bitter rivalry between two cyclists riding the race supposedly for the same team, Hinault vs LeMond, in what Moore dubs the greatest-ever Tour de France, the 1986 edition. It is the sheer range of the riders that Max Leonard captures so well in his book Lanterne Rouge choosing to write not about the winners, but those at the back, the very back of the race, and what keeps them going. Ellis Bacon's Mapping Le Tour provides the definitive insight into the scale of the endeavour of the race, beautifully illustrated, every edition of Le Tour catalogued, each stage recorded. Not only does cycling inspire and attract great writing, but it has a vivid visual culture too. A combination showcased in The Rouleur Centenary Tour de France with the very finest photography of the 2013 race alongside high quality reportage on each of the 21 stages.
The Climb is Chris Froome's newly published autobiography and details his extraordinary road to the Yellow Jersey via growing up in Kenya, school in South Africa, joining the European pro-cycling circuit, debilitating illness and last year's eventual triumph. Read the Wiggins biography My Time to get some kind of inkling of the nature and the depth of the rivalry between the pair of them. Before these two was Mark Cavendish, a rider expected to be very much a part of this year's Tour too. How he has developed and excelled is detailed in his book At Speed. For many though, whatever the scale of Wiggo, Cav and Froome's achievements as British cyclists, the long shadow of the sport's drug problems remains so impenetrable as to cast such successes in doubt. And now with the revelations made spectacularly public and entirely unchallengeable, Armstrong's team-mates are producing confessional-style books to help reveal the mire of performance-enhancing drug culture the sport had become part of. George Hincapie's The Loyal Lieutenant the latest, and as such a close and long-standing team-mate of Armstrong's, one of the most revealing to date too. Juliet Macur's Cycle of Lies provides the panoramic view of perhaps the greatest story of decline and fall in the history of sport with a rare ability to get to grips with what Armstrong, the good the bad and the drugs, came to represent in and beyond his sport.
A huge proportion of those watching Le Tour in Yorkshire will be cyclists themselves, many pedalling their way to reach a prized vantage point on a hill climb. This is in many ways a do-it-yourself sports culture. Kitted out with the Pocket Road Bike Maintenance handbook and the Cyclist's Training Manual the advice will be more than enough to keep bike and body in the kind of shape to ride a Tour stage, or even two. For some the aim will be to rise a 'sportive; the binary opposition of recreation vs competition blurred by a race which is mainly against the clock and our own body's capacity to perform at speed', as documented in Successful Sportives. A tad muscle-bound some of this stuff, certainly gendering the way cycling is consumed and practiced. A welcome relief therefore provided by Caz Nicklin's pioneering The Girls' Bicycle Handbook.
A sense of the potential inclusiveness of cycling is provided by Robert Penn's almost philosophical It's All About The Bike. Penn is a missionary for cycling, he makes no apology for his two-wheeled evangelism.
The rich variety of inspiration cycle racing can provide is admirably presented in the latest volume of The Cycling Anthology.. Ranging over history, philosophy, the mediation and culture of the sport.
And my book of Le TourRichard Moore's superb Étape. Richard Moore takes his reader to the core meaning of this most intriguing of races, the stages where the Yellow Jersey is decided by a lone break, a climb that defies human frailty, a calamity on the road, a rivalry unfolding. It takes three weeks to ride the Tour, ever day filled with drama. This book helps us to understand its ensuring and growing appeal, and to appreciate the tradition and culture this year's Yorkshire Grand Départ will be contributing to in no doubt its own very special way .
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Mark Perryman is the co-founder of the self-styled 'sporting outfitters of intellectual distinction'. aka Philosophy Football.