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A review by barbarajean
Better Than Fiction: True Travel Tales from Great Fiction Writers by Alexander McCall Smith, Lonely Planet, Don George
2.0
It wasn’t. Better than fiction, that is.😉
I was disappointed in this collection of travel stories. There were a few I really liked (especially Bryce Courtenay’s “Getting Travel Dirt Under Your Fingernails” as well as Cunningham’s “Kind of Blue,” Finch’s “A Small World After All,” and Kelman’s “Before the Monsoon”), but overall, there just wasn’t enough depth to each story for me. There was also a bit too much of the Westerner using locals as props for a story, which bothered me a lot (“Chasing Missionaries” in particular). I was looking for more reflection, more exploration of how travel can change us and deepen our perception of the world. Travel so often does that for me, and I missed that depth in this collection.
I was disappointed in this collection of travel stories. There were a few I really liked (especially Bryce Courtenay’s “Getting Travel Dirt Under Your Fingernails” as well as Cunningham’s “Kind of Blue,” Finch’s “A Small World After All,” and Kelman’s “Before the Monsoon”), but overall, there just wasn’t enough depth to each story for me. There was also a bit too much of the Westerner using locals as props for a story, which bothered me a lot (“Chasing Missionaries” in particular). I was looking for more reflection, more exploration of how travel can change us and deepen our perception of the world. Travel so often does that for me, and I missed that depth in this collection.