Well, okay, I have no empirical evidence of this being the #1 bodybuilding book – but it is my personal favorite. Written by Sam Fussell “Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder” is a light hearted and good natured story about the great lengths a bodybuilder will go to for the love of iron.
The book is both amusing and inspirational for competitors. I have read it over and over when in contest prep mode and almost fell into a state of shock when I temporarily lost the book at one stage.
As I dragged myself through my 2nd cardio session of the day after choking down yet another can of tuna reading things like Sam refusing to brush his teeth due to the sodium content in toothpaste would make me realize that I simply wasn’t as dedicated as others and needed to step it up.
From an ew.com review:
The son of not one but two professors of English, and a graduate of Oxford University, Fussell had returned to New York in 1983 before entering graduate school at Yale, when his health inexplicably began to fail. At 6’4” and a ”cadaverous” 170 pounds, he found himself a victim of what his friends laughingly called ”urban dissonance.”
Fussell’s parents were horrified. ”I could see from the look in [my mother’s] eyes,” he writes with characteristically caustic wit, ”that her worst fears were realized. All that was missing was a rifle and the President’s travel itinerary.” His father eventually quit talking to him altogether. Friends wondered if he had gone mad.
Like so many other Americans in the grip of monomania, Fussell soon gravitated to Southern California. There he fell in with a crowd of ”health fascists and gym bunnies” for whom bodybuilding was a veritable creed — ”half Puritanism, half P.T. Barnum.” Self-absorbed or not, Fussell retained a wicked satirical edge. Muscle is full of characters like Xandra, a spandex-clad exercise instructor with an aversion to cellulite: ”I hate fat people, like to the max, don’t you? I mean they’re just so lazy and things. Like, if you don’t have respect for your body, guy, then what do you have? Like, whenever I pass some load, I don’t know whether to stick a finger down my throat or theirs.”
