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.

Reasonably good for most of it then dissolved into a pseudoscience non-proof of the existence of God and support of so-called intelligent design. Without that I'd say the book was a solid 4 but that last but alone would've been a 1.

Loved the essays in the beginning but the tour diary was barely readable. In the end he comes across as a spoiled jerk. But now I do know what venues, hotels, cities, and types of people he hates so I guess I did learn something...

Food, history, culture all wrapped up into one book. Took a while to finish this one as I didn't finish it in time and it had to go back to the library and spend some time with other readers before I could get it back and finish. Glad I persisted.

Wow. What a read. Like reading a story about someone who could be my aunt. Or my own mother - had I been able to bear sticking around... Exhausting and beautiful

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!

Amazing illustrations, beautiful story. I had to read it all in one sitting.

Lovely story - I didn't even know it existed until today. Lucky me for finding it!

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.

Wow - they were worse than I'd even imagined! Really entertaining but I had to take breaks - so many people doing so many bad things all around the world. It boggles the mind.

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.

Beautiful story, beautiful illustrations. Devoured in just a day.

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.

A beautiful biography of one of the top five influential people in my life.

Beautiful story, stunning art. My only complaint is how short it was. I want to read more!

I love stories about the evolution of cuisine. Where do dishes come from, what travels and migrations led to them, and so on. This book delivers all that about what North Americans, and particularly Canadians, think of as “Chinese food” along with a beautiful family story as well.

What an interesting experience to meet unlikeable characters and yet still care what happens to them. Really enjoyed this book and am sad it is over.

Fascinated to see the changes made for the Netflix series. Some huge differences that make me wonder who made the decisions and why.

Nicely illustrated and interesting but I feel as if I would have enjoyed it much more had I been a fan of WWF back in the day.

Brilliant, clever, and engaging. It makes me think about the stories embedded within my own “here.” I couldn't put it down and read it in a single sitting.

I can't spend months or years living in India at this time but this was the next best thing. A little navel-gazy at times and the author has a bad habit of assuming what others must be thinking and presenting it as fact rather than being objective. Still, I quite enjoyed it.

As someone who was a kid in the mid 1970's, it was a fun visit to the time of my childhood. The story was compelling and the artwork was really great.

Decent book with some good points. BUT oh man, the repetition. Concepts were beaten to death even going so far as to literally say at the end “We presented the same list in the introduction...” and then proceeding to copy and paste the content from the beginning all over again. I know repetition helps learning but maybe it also helps bulk up a book when you need to get it to print and you haven't quite got enough content also?

Still, it was an inspiring read despite this obvious flaw.

Merged review:

Decent book with some good points. BUT oh man, the repetition. Concepts were beaten to death even going so far as to literally say at the end “We presented the same list in the introduction...” and then proceeding to copy and paste the content from the beginning all over again. I know repetition helps learning but maybe it also helps bulk up a book when you need to get it to print and you haven't quite got enough content also?

Still, it was an inspiring read despite this obvious flaw.