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A review by smitchy
Neither Here Nor There by Bill Bryson
2.0
Not my favourite Bryson by a long shot. I have read and /or listened to a fair few others and this was the crudest - in a literal sense, there is a lot of swearing - and it felt a bit unpolished. I don't know if this is because the other books I have read are later in his work and therefore benefiting from more experience or if the constant profanity was putting me off. Don't get me wrong I can swear with the best of them but this kind of felt like he was trying to impress an audience of twenty year old boys.
The actual "travel" part of this was occasionally enlightening but mostly I found Bryson's hyperbolic style off putting. Every interaction was to one extreme or another. He spends so much time bemoaning (frequently American) tourists cluttering up all these places he (a British / American tourist) is trying to see it gets old fast. Yes, 20 years previously all these places probably were less crowded and less "touristy" but so what? This is how they are now (or at least how they are in the early 1990's). I have been to many of the places he goes through and while occasionally accurate even in the early 2000s things were not as bad as he exaggerates them to be.
The actual "travel" part of this was occasionally enlightening but mostly I found Bryson's hyperbolic style off putting. Every interaction was to one extreme or another. He spends so much time bemoaning (frequently American) tourists cluttering up all these places he (a British / American tourist) is trying to see it gets old fast. Yes, 20 years previously all these places probably were less crowded and less "touristy" but so what? This is how they are now (or at least how they are in the early 1990's). I have been to many of the places he goes through and while occasionally accurate even in the early 2000s things were not as bad as he exaggerates them to be.