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3.86 AVERAGE
3.86 AVERAGE
Good story about a long ride on the silk road with reflections on the nature and history of exploration. I liked the author's ruminations on the latter as she expertly debunks myths of famous personalities like Darwin and Marco Polo.
One-sentence review if you're not into novella reviews, which is more my steady jam: One of the best writers I've stumbled into in recent memory, but exceptionally difficult in places to read past the author's inherent white privilege.
I have many thoughts about this strange beauty of a book. A list, then!
1. First, it's the first book I've stumbled into in a long time where the writing is simply stunning. In places, it's absolutely perfect: visual and clever in all the right places. But there are also plenty of pages and chapters where it feels imbalanced in that regard. Beautiful sentences are worthy, and I want to read them, but I crave stark sentences in between whimsical, witty turns of phrase. There were times when it felt like Harris was putting all of her best visual whimsy to work to describe places and situations when myriad simpler sentences would have sufficed. It's a stylistic choice, and I get why she made it, but in my opinion in places it negatively affected the overall pacing and flow of the book. (I'm realizing that this is likely more of an editing critique than anything else.)
2. I liked the gritty bits, and that Harris wasn't afraid to share them. The mistakes, fatigue-induced poor decisions, the soreness and reluctance/inability to move. Being married to a man who had a bike for legs when I met him, and who used his superhero legs to spend three consecutive summers long-distance bike touring across the U.S. (with special emphasis on climbing and descending steep mountain passes), I appreciated the honesty and unexpected twists and turns in both the route and the narrative.
3. I really liked Mel (the friend and woman who biked the Silk Road with Harris). Her comedic timing (as Harris recounted it) was consistently one of my favorite parts of the entire book.
4. I didn't so much like the places where it felt like Harris was a) making sweeping generalizations about an entire country based on a few interactions with a handful of locals and/or what she read/knew about said country from various books, and b) outright judging/poking fun at locals met along the Silk Road, especially when they were simply parts of a moving background to her as she and her friend(s) biked through. (There was a specific passage where Harris made a disparaging and strange remark about the sagging of a woman's breasts, and in my mind there's just no reason for that, in this book or in any book, and I really wish Harris hadn't wrote it, yes, but also that her editor(s) would have caught it.) It also seemed like Harris was going out of her way to prove she was more intelligent than most people, and especially locals, when all it really did was illuminate the privilege she's been privy to her entire life.
5. I actually think this would have worked better as a collection of essays vs. a standard travel memoir.
6. Ultimately, for me, the beauty of Harris' writing and her moments of vivid insight outweigh the pieces that don't work.
[Five stars for some stunning passages minus two stars for some ugly white privilege equals three stars for a memorable debut that made me want to bike tour even more than I already do.]
I have many thoughts about this strange beauty of a book. A list, then!
1. First, it's the first book I've stumbled into in a long time where the writing is simply stunning. In places, it's absolutely perfect: visual and clever in all the right places. But there are also plenty of pages and chapters where it feels imbalanced in that regard. Beautiful sentences are worthy, and I want to read them, but I crave stark sentences in between whimsical, witty turns of phrase. There were times when it felt like Harris was putting all of her best visual whimsy to work to describe places and situations when myriad simpler sentences would have sufficed. It's a stylistic choice, and I get why she made it, but in my opinion in places it negatively affected the overall pacing and flow of the book. (I'm realizing that this is likely more of an editing critique than anything else.)
2. I liked the gritty bits, and that Harris wasn't afraid to share them. The mistakes, fatigue-induced poor decisions, the soreness and reluctance/inability to move. Being married to a man who had a bike for legs when I met him, and who used his superhero legs to spend three consecutive summers long-distance bike touring across the U.S. (with special emphasis on climbing and descending steep mountain passes), I appreciated the honesty and unexpected twists and turns in both the route and the narrative.
3. I really liked Mel (the friend and woman who biked the Silk Road with Harris). Her comedic timing (as Harris recounted it) was consistently one of my favorite parts of the entire book.
4. I didn't so much like the places where it felt like Harris was a) making sweeping generalizations about an entire country based on a few interactions with a handful of locals and/or what she read/knew about said country from various books, and b) outright judging/poking fun at locals met along the Silk Road, especially when they were simply parts of a moving background to her as she and her friend(s) biked through. (There was a specific passage where Harris made a disparaging and strange remark about the sagging of a woman's breasts, and in my mind there's just no reason for that, in this book or in any book, and I really wish Harris hadn't wrote it, yes, but also that her editor(s) would have caught it.) It also seemed like Harris was going out of her way to prove she was more intelligent than most people, and especially locals, when all it really did was illuminate the privilege she's been privy to her entire life.
5. I actually think this would have worked better as a collection of essays vs. a standard travel memoir.
6. Ultimately, for me, the beauty of Harris' writing and her moments of vivid insight outweigh the pieces that don't work.
[Five stars for some stunning passages minus two stars for some ugly white privilege equals three stars for a memorable debut that made me want to bike tour even more than I already do.]