A Dragon Apparent: Travels in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam

Sadly, I really struggled with this book. I have read around 10 books by Norman Lewis and generally enjoyed them (non-fiction more than fiction, to be fair), and I own another 4 titles.

This one however was perplexing. The subject is interesting to me, in general - Indochina, which Lewis visits in 1950, carrying out a reasonably thorough journey through Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. He splits his time with the French colonists and the minority tribes, and mixes history with his present day experiences.

But to explain what the issues with the book are, is more complicated than the overview... I found I never go t into the flow of the writing. While I didn't find it hard to read, but it was never hard to put down. I struggled to pick it back up, and readily jumped onto other books rather than back onto this. I had to force myself to read it chapter by chapter, and as a consequence started skimming. One this starts, it is pretty much all over, as you lose thread of the narrative, and miss out on the details.

I have no other revelations about this book. I strongly recommend you read it and form your own opinion and don't use my review as a reason to avoid it. This is, however, one of the earlier books written by Lewis, and perhaps it is not his finest work - finding his style and his way in travel journalism perhaps.

This is perhaps a book I will return to in the future to try again.

I could not go beyond 2.5 stars, which I can only round down.