Wanderlust is Elizabeth Eaves’ memoir of her travels from her late teen years to her mid-30s, and like any travel memoir it suffers somewhat from the delusions of grandeur of its main character/author. The friend who lent it to me did so with the disclaimer that, “she’s a bit pretentious, but aren’t all travel writers? I think you have to be in order to think that other people are going to be interested in your travel diary.” My friend is not wrong. I love to […]
A Road Trip with a Dog
I read this due to my Steinbeck kick. I was a little worried about reading it immediately after The Grapes of Wrath but it was the perfect antidote to my melancholy mood. This is a travel journey by one of America’s preeminent authors who decided that that he no longer felt in touch with America and her people and wanted to find her again. Discontented seems to best describe the way he felt with his life when he set off on his journey in 1960 […]
Don’t let the cover mislead you. There are no grizzlies on the Appalachian Trail.
I added this book to my TBR the very first day I joined Goodreads in July 2008, so yes I do feel accomplished for finally having read it. And it was a good time! I was a bit worried based on a few reviews I’d read ahead of time that it would be dated, and it was a tiny bit (mostly in some jokes Bryson makes that read a little fatphobic to my 2018 eyes and ears, but would have been absolutely bog standard in […]
Everything is awful
Fresh from finding Dr Livingstone in the Congo, newspaperman Henry Stanley sensed an opportunity and so, in 1877, returned to the Congo to travel through its interior and map its giant river. Despite the mouth to the river having been discovered by Portuguese explorers in the 15th century, until then no outsiders had ever attempted to travel further than the coast. Following the initial routes laid out by the slavers who virtually decimated its coastal communities, Stanley accomplished his mission, opening the interior up to […]