The Book List

Neither Here Nor There

Author:: Bill Bryson, an Iowan cum Brit cum New Englander who likes to travel. Or actually it often seems that he hates to travel, but perhaps that's part of the charm. Actually, I think everyone hates to travel when you get down to it. Anyway.
Pages: 245 of them. (About 45 too many.)
What's it about:Mr. Bryson loses his sanity once again and decides to backpack across Europe.
Means of Aquiration: I put it on my dad's Christmas list, and he got it from my grandmother.
Trivia: Bryson uses the word convivial more than any other author I know.

I'm a fan of Bryson's The Lost Continent, but Neither Here Nor There didn't have quite the charm I was expecting. Perhaps it was the monotony: in each city he visits, the reader is treated to what he does there, which is largely limited to "Found a hotel, which was expensive. Wandered about the city. Visited an old church, and got to drinking."

Just the same, I did quite enjoy it, though it dragged intolerably at the end. I'd be lying if I said I didn't giggle uncontrollably at several points, and while I shant be reading it again for some time, I probably shall dig it out again in the future.

Yay or Nay? Yay.

Click below for quotes.

Excerpt

...Once, in Bavaria, Katz and I recklessly ordered Kalbsbrann from an indecipherable menu, and a minute later the proprietor appeared at our table, looking hesitant and embarrassed, wringing his hands on a slauterhouse apron.

"Excuse me so much, gentlemens," he said, "but are you knowing what Kalbsbrann is?"

We looked at eachother and allowed that we did not.

"It is, how you say, what ze little cow thinks wiz," he says.

Katz swooned. I thanked the man profusely for his thoughtfulness, though I daresay it was a self-interested desire not to have two young Americans projectile-vomiting across his dining room that brought him to our talbe, and asked him to provide us with something that would pass for food in Iowa.
-Pages 73 and 74