I find Bryson a very skilful author, easy to read, enjoyable while it lasts and then completely forgettable. It is the the snack you can read between books and not spoil your appetite. All I can definitely remember from this one is the 'pick-up' line his sidekick used in pubs and clubs he invited young women to assist him in moving his seminal fluid a short distance in more or less those words, at least, that is how Bryson reports it.

It is an OK, middle of the road, Bryson effort. The middle of the road is where Bryson aspires to be, and that is the key to his writing. It is not challenging, there is flow, he creates a genial atmosphere. In it's own way it is almost perfect writing, demonstrating a consistently easy facility. From another point of view it's strengths make it highly unsatisfying, it is lazy, makes no connection with the people or places he visits and provides no insights into other lives. It is the literary equivalent of easy listening, perfectly providing the experience of having a pleasant time without actually engaging the reader in a substantive way.

This book is neither enlightening nor informative, I would recommend Notes from a Small Island as the best example of his work.

Bill Bryson's book 'Neither Here nor There' is hilarious. This is a travelogue about a journey through Europe which could easily pass as a stand-up comedian's dialogue.

The book was written in 1992, so I am certain a lot of the author's descriptions of hotels, streets, restaurants, museums, landscapes, cities, trains and people he saw on his journey through Europe are lacking somewhat in current usefulness to travelers hoping to see exactly today what he saw back then almost thirty years ago. However, the book is so funny it is worth the read.

There often is an over-the-top, unhelpful satirical commentary running in the privacy of my mind as I muse over dark, sad, ugly or cruel things. I frequently suffer from existential depression, and for some reason, an exaggerated feeling of humor-infused hysteria often accompanies my inner sense of doom and gloom. Bryson says all of what he is thinking, no matter how inappropriately satirical, out openly on the printed page. To my astonishment, he clearly is a writer who often feels the world as I do.


Examples:

"The owner says: ""Is he bothering you?"" I answer: ""No, Jim, I adore it when a dog gets his teeth around my balls and frantically rubs the side of my head with his rear leg."" ""I can put him out if he's bothering you,"" the owner adds. Hey, I want to reply, don't put him out, put him down."


"To my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you. They are harmless, they look nice, they don't need a box to crap in, they keep the grass down, and they are so trusting and stupid that you can't help lose your heart to them. Where I live in Yorkshire, there's a herd of cows down the lane. You can stand by the wall at any hour of the day or night, and after a minute the cows will all waddle over and stand with you, much too stupid to know what to do next, but happy to be with you. They will stand there all day, as far as I can tell, possibly till the end of time. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends forever. And when you get tired of them, you can kill them and eat them. Perfect."


"In the middle of the table sat a large cast-iron platter, which I assumed was an ashtray, and then I had the unsettling thought that perhaps it was some kind of food receptacle and that the waitress would come along in a minute and put some bread in it. I looked around the room to see if any of the other few customers were using theirs as an ashtray, but no one seemed to be, so I snatched out my cigarette butt and dead match and secreted them in a pot plant beside the table, and then tried to disperse the ash by blowing, but the ash went all over the tablecloth. As I tried to brush it away, I knocked my glass with the side of my hand and slopped beer all across the table."

"By the time I had finished, much of the tablecloth was a series of gray smudges outlined in a large, irregular patch of yellow that looked distressingly like a urine stain. I casually tried to hide this with my elbow and upper body when the waitress brought my dinner, but she saw instantly what a mess I had made of things and gave me a look not of contempt, as I had dreaded, but--worse--of sympathy. It was the look you might give a stroke victim who has lost control over the muscles of his mouth but is still gamely trying to feed himself."

"For one horrible moment, I thought she might tie a napkin around my neck and cut up my food for me. Instead, she retreated to her station behind the bar, but she kept a compassionate eye on me throughout the meal, ready to spring forward if any pieces of cutlery should clatter from my grasp of if a sudden spasm cause me to tip over backward. I was very pleased to get out of there. The cast-iron platter was an ashtray, by the way."


"But back then I was too meek to do anything but listen politely and utter non-committal ""hmmmmms"" to their suggestions that Jesus could turn my life around. Somewhere over the Atlantic, as I was sitting taking stock of my two hundred cubic centimeters of personal space, as one does on a long plane flight, I spied a coin under the seat in front of me, and with protracted difficulty leaned forward and snagged it. When I sat up, I saw my seatmate was at last looking at me with that ominous glow. [He spent most of the flight reading Holy Scripture, moving both sets of fingertips across each line of text as he read and voicing the words just loud enough for me to hear them as a fervent whisper in my right ear.]"

""Have you found Jesus?"" he asked suddenly."

""Uh, no, it's a quarter"" I answered and quickly settled down and pretended for the next six hours to be asleep, ignoring his whispered entreaties to let Christ build a bunkhouse in my heart."


"In my lonely, enfeebled state, I began to think about my old hometown diner. It was called the Y Not Grill, which everyone assumed was short for Y Not Come In and Get Food Poisoning."....."The Y Not had a waitress named Shirley who was the most unpleasant person I have ever met. Whatever you ordered, she would look as if you just asked to borrow her car to take her daughter to Tijuana for a filthy weekend. ""You want what?"" she would say. ""A guinea grinder and onion rings,"" you would repeat apologetically. ""Please, Shirley. If it's not too much trouble. When you get a minute.""

"Shirley would stare at you for up to five minutes, as if memorizing your features for the police report, then scrawl the order on a pad and shout out to the cook in the curious dopey lingo they use in diners: ""Two loose stools and a bucket of mud,"" or whatever."


I just about died laughing when I read the above paragraphs I have copied out, and I was guffawing loudly several other times while reading this book. I don't care that the book is dated - it is a very funny travelogue.

The author visited towns and cities in Norway, France, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, Yugoslavia and Turkey. He writes in telling vignettes his impressions of hotels, people, street life, landscapes and museums. He is extremely amusing whether he enjoyed being a visitor somewhere or not. Gentle reader, besides that the book is out-of-date in regards to current conditions in the countries he traveled through, he is sometimes not very PC. There is an index included.

I originally started this book over 5 years ago, rapidly flicking through it and laughing audibly while reading it. That was until I left it on a bus, doomed to never finish it.

Colour me surprised however when I saw it sitting on a bookcase at my local bookshop. I was instantly transported back and bought it immediately.

I am glad that I lost it in the end, Bryson describes in a brutal but hilarious way his travels all across Europe and in the 5 years that have passed I now have visited a lot of the same places. Able to picture his descriptions and the quirks of the people a lot better.

In fact I now have a couple more places to add to the ever growing list of places to visit but that’s “neither here nor there”.

Yes, it might be outdated, and yes, it's self-absorbed but it's so refreshingly blunt, and his humour is brilliant. Of course, that's just IMHO. Bill Bryson is one of the few authors (or travel writers) who can make me larf out loud. He could/should have been a stand-up comic, I think.

And even though I've had some disappointing experiences with audio books -- which have completely turned me off even reading the book in print -- this reading by William Roberts is priceless. No doubt Bill Bryson reading his own work would be pretty good too, but Roberts's voice and reading style really does it for me -- even if his rendition of an Australian accent is a bit wonky.

I'm finding Bryson audio books a great cure for mid-morning insomnia. Now this sounds like a bad thing -- "Bill Bryson's travel tales are so boring, you fall asleep?" I hear you cry. No, they are so entertaining, they take your mind off those 3 a.m wake ups when your brain goes into overdrive. Listening to Bill's travel observations and anecdotes is like a grown-up version of having a parent read you a bed-time story which let's you drift off to sleep with a smile on your face. But maybe that's just me and my twisted sense of humour that is too much like Bryson's...

I wouldn't argue if you dismissed Bill Bryson's sense of humor as juvenile. It often is, at least in this early work (I believe it was his first book). Bryson can come across as too fond of the literary personae that he crafts over the course of these pages: the ignorant and vulgar American abroad. One senses it's rooted in truth, but over-exaggerated for effect, at times to a tedious degree.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe, at least in doses. I was drawn to it shortly before my first ever trip to Europe, in the spring of 2004. I think it encouraged me to approach the daunting prospect of shoestring international travel with a spirit of levity. I believe reading it helped me navigate through the ordeal. It definitely helped ratchet up my excitement to finally, at age 33, behold my ancestral continent with my own eyes.

I gather that Bill Bryson, without doubt an intelligent and thoughtful man, has evolved over the years into a more confident and mature writer: an entertaining expositor of a wide range of intellectual subjects for a popular audience: or, in short, a rather admirable human being. He may stand as living proof that travel broadens the mind.

I didn't finish this book. I was planning to because I really like how Bryson describes PLACES, and I also like the stories about Katz. Yet, I couldn't finish. Every single chapter (and sometimes more frequently) Bryson veers off and starts saying horrible things about women. Either he would be rambling about high school woodshop class and how he would leer at the girls' P.E. class outside (this may seem somewhat innocuous but I got really skeeved out by how he wrote about these young girls as a 40 year-old-man) or he's talking about how a woman is too ugly, too old or too fat.

He hates women, and I really, really tried to ignore it, but this is what made me rage quit:

"These photographs, however, showed gyrating women of frightfully advanced years - women with maroon hair and thighs that put me in mind of flowing lava. These ladies must have been past their best when the Beatles were playing. They weren't just over the hill; they were pinpricks on the horizon."

Mind you, he had already said some racist things about prostitutes earlier in the book:

"Twenty years ago the prostitutes were all Dutch. They were friendly and sweet-natured and often heartbreakingly attractive. But now the prostitutes were Asian or African, and they looked mean and weathered, even when they were pouting and blowing kisses in their most coquettish, come-hither manner."

ew ew ew ew
ew ew ew
ew ew
ew

Apparently this is Bryson's schtick. I should have known better since I read A Walk in the Woods last year. While I enjoyed it, even then I noticed that he is "humor" writer whose whole "humor" thing focuses on disparaging people's looks.

If you've never read any of Bill Bryson's travel books, you should. This is the third one I've read, and, like the other two ("Notes from a Small Island" and "I'm a Stranger Here Myself") I found it hysterically funny, entertaining, and enlightening. Although the book was written in 2001, my guess is that what Bryson captured in terms of the feel of each place he visited in Europe is probably still accurate. His descriptions are so vivid - the sights, the sounds, the people, the trains, the hotels (some flea-bags and some very nice) - that I really felt I was on the journey with him. But the best thing is the humor which infuses all of his stories (I laughed out loud countless times). His humor and conversational writing style pull you in from the start. I couldn't put the book down.

Bryson at his worst. He is the whining American tourist he claims to detest. Meandering through a dozen or so european countries, he manages to complain about virtually every hotel accomodation. And for christ sake Bill, put a freakin map in your book. I'm not totally ignorant when it comes to european geography but if youre gonna write about travelling hundreds of miles every other day, i'd like to glance at the route with out having to bust out my world atlas.
After Shorthistoryof nearly everything i was so high on him, now this...

Annoying. Boring. NOT funny.
I got tired of Mr Bryson's "dull company" long before he himself did (on p. 235).
My advice: Avoid this at all cost if you are fond of travelling in Europe.

"Hugely funny (not snigger-snigger funny, but great-big-belly-laugh-till-you-cry-funny" - Daily Telegraph.

Hmmm... I think that review is a trifle misleading falsehood. Sure, some parts were funny, but it wasn't the sort to make your belly hurt and make you cry.

I can sum up the book with this: Mr. Bryson goes from one country to another and:

1. Finds himself a hotel. Always expensive. So he ends up complaining.
2. Finds a restaurant/bar. Finds it expensive and/or food is terrible. So he ends up complaining.
3. Walks around the city. Always finds flaws here and there. So he again ends up complaining.
4. Finds himself in a crowded train station, and again complains about the long queues.

In the book's 22 chapters, that was almost always the scene. Not one part of the book gave me the sense of excitement; which I believe it should have! It is a book about traveling anyway... in Europe!!

What Bill Bryson did was not traveling at all. He lacked the whole sense of it. Traveling is not just about roaming around, stopping by bars, getting drunk, noticing how awfully constructed a building is, or how noisy and dirty the streets are. It is about getting into the heart of a country... id est, its culture.. its people. He missed that.

Read years ago,but I remember enjoying it hugely.The humour may be a little crude,but it is still delightful,with lots of laugh out loud moments.Interwoven with this trip is the story of another European trip he undertook in the 1970s,in the company of his friend Katz.This time he visits a lot of countries,from one end of Europe to the other.However,the visits to each country are brief.I would have preferred a more detailed exploration of these countries in Bryson's trademark style.

How have I lived 40 years without the company of the marvelous Bill Bryson? And HOW did I not recognize his amazing talent in the first few pages of Neither Here Nor There: Travels In Europe? Seriously, when I started the book (he begins his adventure in Norway, or Finland or somewhere), I wasn't that impressed. I'm ashamed to admit it, but I may have even thought, "I could write this." (I know, blasphemy.) I may have even said it out loud to a few people that now I’ll have to dispose of.

But nope, nope, nope. That Billy is a gem. I've already started The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America, and I've marked all the rest of his books as "To Read." His writing brought me (and my husband--I kept interrupting him to read a funny passage) such laughter, comfort, and curiosity.

Bryson has such a conversational, humble way about him. Here's one of the passages that propelled me to wake my husband up so I could read it to him (and he didn't punch me either; he laughed too!):

Liechtenstein’s last military engagement was in 1866, when it sent eighty men to fight against the Italians. Nobody was killed. In fact—you’re going to like this—they came back with 81 men, because they had made a friend on the way. Two years later, realizing that the Liechtensteiners could beat no one, the crown prince disbanded the army.

Another favorite passage, in which our hero visits a a church in Rome, made out of human bones:

In the occasional corner stood the complete skeleton of a Capuchin monk dressed like the Grim Reaper in his hooded robe, and ranged along the outer wall were signs in six languages with such cheery sentiments as WE WERE LIKE YOU. YOU WILL BE LIKE US. and a long poem engagingly called “My Mother Killed Me!!” These guys must have been a barrel of laughs to be around. You can imagine every time you got the flu some guy coming along with a tape measure and a thoughtful expression.

One more!

...I spent an absurd amount of time shopping for things for the trip—a travel clock, a Swiss army knife, a bright green and yellow rucksack, which my wife assured me would be just the thing if I decided to do any gay camping...

What I appreciated most about Bryson is that he doesn't force the humor. There are long passages or pages that are simply just good travel writing. You are so absorbed by his travels, and receive such an exquisite sense of place, that when he does make a funny observation, it's enough to make you double over. Or wake up your husband.

I'd love to give Bryson room to grow as I read more of his books, but I had such an amazing time with this one, I’m giving it 5 shining stars.