Just take those old novels off the shelf

Clearing out the book pantry in the new year

If you subscribe to this newsletter, chances are you’re the type of person who has a home full of books. We have them everywhere, in every room, stuffed into bookshelves and spilling over tables and stacked where nothing is supposed to be stacked. I try to keep stray books off my desk so I have a clean place to work. Right now there are 13 stray books on my desk. My methods are, let’s say, ineffective.

And of course we keep bringing books into the house. I’ve been buying books since I borrowed against my allowance for the Scholastic Book Club and I’m not about to stop now. But I did think at some point that it might be nice to actually read some of the books that have been sitting unread on our shelves for years. I’m thinking of it like clearing out the pantry — finally using that tin of sardines or can of water chestnuts you bought on a whim and ended up on the back of a shelf.

I was thinking this might be a project we could do together — you can grab an old book off your shelf and talk about it in the comments. I don’t have a great name for it yet — maybe one of y’all can come up with that, too.

The first book I picked is one from the top shelf of the bookshelf next to our bed. It’s a 2012 novel by Chris Cleave called GOLD.

The copy I have doesn’t have this dust jacket — just a plain black cover. It was a library book at some point.

I have no memory of buying it. I do remember hearing about it and having a vague memory that it was about Olympic bicyclists. That’s all I knew going in.

So here’s the basic story: Zoe and Kate are competitors in the world of British indoor cycling (the kind where they race in a velodrome). They’re the two best women in England at the sport. They have the same coach, train in the same place and race against each other constantly. But they have VERY different personalities. And their personal lives also get entangled with their sporting lives in difficult and dramatic ways.

When I say “dramatic,” I mean “sometimes MELOdramatic.” One of the other main characters is Kate’s daughter, an 8-year-old who obsesses over the Star Wars universe and also has leukemia. Cleave splits the book into chapters with a clever trick: Instead of just numbering them, or naming the character who’s speaking, he does the heading by place — the characters’ apartments, the training center, and so on. When it’s time for a section about the 8-year-old, the setting is usually something like “The Forest Moon of Endor.”

If you’re OK with a taste of soap in your opera — I am — Cleave is really good at diving into why the characters do what they do, where their pressure points lie, and why something so surface-level silly as a bicycle race might matter so much. I’m going to move it on out to our Little Free Library so someone else can enjoy. But I recommend it.

Also, this passage (involving the cyclists’ coach) gives me a glimpse into my future:

I’m now fully expecting to break a hip to “Groove Is In the Heart,” which will be OK with me.

So … if you grab an old book off the shelf and give it a try for the first time, let me know in the comments. And of course I’m always looking to hear about new books, too.

— TT