Daren
I probably should have predicted this book wouldn't be a great fit for me.
The premise is simple enough - travel author with previous book about 80 trains in India needs to write another book. Lets go bigger and do a bigger journey on 80 trains, Europe and Asia. Fiancé is worried about travel author travelling alone, so at sort of the last minute he joins the journey. Then a friend decides to tag along for the last half.
This was lite, uncontroversial and superficial. However it was easy to read and pretty harmless, so no doubt it will appeal to lots of people.
For me there was way too much minor griping about train conditions, comparing train conditions to other trains, and the dull drudgery of travel where authors insist of describing each time they have to find a hotel, or what they ate for dinner each night. Worse, is there were pages and pages of superficial chat (gossip) about random people they met on the trains - not character studies in the form of excellent train travel author Paul Theroux where were the reader is treated to quirky, interesting, often bizarre character, but too often uninteresting people.
There were some more interesting an in depth sections, North Korea and Tibet come to mind, but there was nothing very new or groundbreaking reported here.
I guess I was underwhelmed by this one.
2.5 stars
I probably should have predicted this book wouldn't be a great fit for me.
The premise is simple enough - travel author with previous book about 80 trains in India needs to write another book. Lets go bigger and do a bigger journey on 80 trains, Europe and Asia. Fiancé is worried about travel author travelling alone, so at sort of the last minute he joins the journey. Then a friend decides to tag along for the last half.
This was lite, uncontroversial and superficial. However it was easy to read and pretty harmless, so no doubt it will appeal to lots of people.
For me there was way too much minor griping about train conditions, comparing train conditions to other trains, and the dull drudgery of travel where authors insist of describing each time they have to find a hotel, or what they ate for dinner each night. Worse, is there were pages and pages of superficial chat (gossip) about random people they met on the trains - not character studies in the form of excellent train travel author Paul Theroux where were the reader is treated to quirky, interesting, often bizarre character, but too often uninteresting people.
There were some more interesting an in depth sections, North Korea and Tibet come to mind, but there was nothing very new or groundbreaking reported here.
I guess I was underwhelmed by this one.
2.5 stars