FOR a sport that ranks below Darts in terms of its popularity with television companies, cycling has inspired a prodigious amount of literature.

Type the word "cycling" into Amazon and you’ll get an astonishing 3,423 results. Narrow it down to"Tour de France" and you still get 236 - over one book for every rider in this year’s event.

The quality is understandably variable, ranging from the breathtaking to the risible, with a fair amount of mediocrity nestling between the two.

The sport’s biggest name remains Lance Armstrong and his breathtaking career was in no way undersold by his autobiography: "It’s Not About The Bike."

This story is more about cancer than cycling. In 1996 Armstrong ignored a lump near his groin for weeks until the pain forced him to consult a doctor.

He was diagnosed with testicular cancer.

The disease spread to his brain and he was given less than a 40 per cent chance of survival.

Armstrong survived, partly because his career as a cyclist taught him to deal with a level of physical pain that would cripple the average person.

The reprieve gave Armstrong an abnormal level of desire to not only return to the sport but to go on and dominate it and his autobiography is a compelling tale of suffering, a theme that dominates cycling literature.

Arguably one of the best books about any sport launched the career of the Sunday Times’ Paul Kimmage, a former Tour rider whose 1990 work: "A Rough Ride", did much to shatter the image of cycling as a clean sport.

Kimmage seemed to do nothing but suffer during his career and his book details his transformation from wide-eyed Irish amateur to a jaded professional, sick of competing against rivals who were doped up to their eyeballs.

The most shocking aspect of his tale is the fact that by "spitting in the soup" his fellow riders felt he had committed a greater crime than any of the drug cheats he’d exposed.

It's compelling, but its only drawback is that the relentlessly depressing tone means that after reading it you not only lose your belief in cycling, but also the will to live.

To restore your faith get the Official Tour de France Centennial, compiled by the newspaper L’Equipe, a brilliant history of the race’s first 100 years.

The annual race summaries are accompanied by fascinating archive material, reproductions of contemporary articles and bonus features, including a section on the race’s pale imitators during the German occupation.

The Centennial would be a decent read in its own right, but its pictures are its prime asset - the palme d’or going to a shot of the peloton temporarily abandoning the race and scattering their bikes on a beach, so they can take an impromptu dip in the Med.

Better still, get The Treasures of the Tour de France, a collaboration between L’Equipe’s Serge Laget and the Tonbridge-based author Luke Edwardes-Evans. At a lowest price of £21 this is "a bit Uriah", but you do get what you pay for.

The gatefold book contains series of essays on pages that fold out, revealing "treasures", if that isn’t overstating the case slightly, including letters from the race founder Henri Desgranges and postcards with sketches of the race by Salvador Dali, a man whose moustache could well have inspired handlebar design for generations to come.

However, if you really want to get inside the head of a professional cyclist, the definitive work is actually a novel, "The Rider", written by the Dutchman Tim Krabbe, who later wrote the psychological chiller "The Vanishing".

On the very first page Krabbe is preparing for a race in the Alps and casts a withering eye at the picnicking families he passes on his way to the start line: "The meaningless of those lives shocks me."

Krabbe is consumed by the race, despite the suffering it inflicts on him, to the point that it becomes his entire life - and that is what the Tour de France can do to you - if you let it.