Rereading Lance Armstrong

Update on a previous post. I want to reread all my favorite books. I'm currently rereading It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life.

It's interesting. I can see why I loved this book so much in the past. For obvious reasons, it doesn't read the same as it used to. Not just because Lance Armstrong has been exposed as a cheater, and worse a person willing to attack and attempt to ruin other people's lives to keep his lie. Those bits of the story are very prevalent between the lines. But there is something else too, I'm going to keep reading and come back to it with a better explanation.

This book will not maintain it's 5 star rating, and I'm going to finish it. 

One interesting aspect is the writing. It's grammatically correct and all, but it's not well written, which is funny because Sally Jenkins is a great writer. The voice feels off too. It is like Jenkins is trying to make Armstrong more readable, but she is stuck with what he has to tell her. I've heard interviews with Armstrong and he doesn't use the words Jenkins writes. I've read other writing of Jenkins and she tells a lot more interesting stories. The story told by Armstrong is boring. Not the whole book but the chapters about cancer are. He doesn't teach readers much. There are insights into cancer and the struggles with the process, but nothing worthy of a bestseller. The dialogue is flat. It comes off as if Armstrong is telling the story with a thesaurus.

It's so ironic. This book was a #1 New York Times bestseller. People loved the book and Armstrong for the fairy tale story of the guy who almost died from cancer and then came back to be one of the greatest athletes in sports history.

It makes me wonder if Jenkins knew part of the lie. And maybe this motivated her to keep the voice and story subpar. That's all folks.

Until I finish the book... that's it.