while bill bryson does possess a fair amount of the cranky traveler that has overwhelmed the genre these days (and is found particularly appealing by the united states audiences) it fails to appeal to the younger traveler-more hopeful traveler

the comments that i found to be most exciting/humorous/poignant were those involving mr bryson's earlier european travail with the unfortunately unlikeable katz, particulalrly their almost pathetic and as my bryson claims, "catholic" starved sex drives, adventures with the opposite sex

people out of their twenties may find mr. bryson incredibly poignant and humorous, however i feel that that may be the extent of his appeal

I simply cannot read this book anywhere in public, because I just collapse with laughing, and people stare. You really have to enjoy Bryson's snarky sense of humor to get him; otherwise I could see how he would strike some people as whiny. When he loves a place, he really loves it, but if there is something to be exasperated about, he will let you know. I enjoy this as much as Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad, for the same kind of snarky humor.

Overall I enjoyed reading this travel memoir. Mr Bryson is witty and at times I was laughing so hard I had a hard time breathing. BUT, I found his repeated racial slurs annoying, then tiresome, then as they continued I was offended and somewhat disgusted. He goes a bit too far about Germans joking that he could recognize them by their jackboots. He loves to paint an entire country's population with the same brush. He says a couple of times that he thinks the Italians shouldn't have been told about the invention of the car because of the way they drive, but forgets the fact that they have designed and built some of the most amazing cars the world has ever seen. There are many more examples of his overly simplistic worldview that I will not include. If I was actually from any of the countries he traveled to I think I would have dropped his book in the nearest garbage can as soon as I read the first paragraph of his visit to my country. Lucky for me I am Canadian and could read on with mild annoyance. If you have enjoyed his writing in the past or if you yourself are slightly or even very racist you will enjoy this book.

I have spent two quarantined afternoons taking a lawn chair tour of Europe with Bill Bryson - a nice diversion. Written in 1991, early in his travel writings, I don’t think he had quite hit the stride he later developed. Was surprised at a lot of crude, vulgar language and so many sexual references, pretty raw. He seems to have cleaned up his act in the past 30 years!

I enjoyed Googling most of the places he mentioned, made me feel like I was actually accompanying him. I also had a big paper map (yes paper) along side my chair so I could follow along his trek country by country. I wish he would go back now and write on the changes or lack thereof.

Nearly choked when I read his comment on the beautiful view in Capri. He was lamenting that he couldn’t own such a wonderful sight and it occurred to him that it was probably owned by Donald Trump or some Italian equivalent - too busy making deals and screwing people to even notice the view!! And 30 years later the Orange Orangutan is now screwing the whole country!

Another book that falls outside my typical reading pattern, and another book that I snagged during the great book giveaway at work. I like Bryson's breezy style with lots of humor, laced with profanity, and sharp but sympathetic observations of human nature. I appreciate the fact that he presents his apparently raw, unfiltered thoughts rather than giving some kind of rose-colored view of the places he visits. He's not afraid to describe the raw sewage running from a sewer pipe right between relative expensive hotels, or the over-priced, nasty, bland meals at another location. Those unpleasant sections are enmeshed with descriptions of serene parks and uplifting vistas, and in combination this approach creates a picture that feels more accurate than just a straightforward description of the tourist highlights one might get from another author.

A quest to see the Northern Lights inspires Bryson to recreate his rambles around Europe from the summer after high school. He travels around Europe by bus, train, and plane, looking for good, reasonably priced meals and beers, and finding them . . . most of the time. He reminiscences about the things that have changed in twenty years, since he was there either alone or with his friend, the inimitable Katz, and the things that have stayed the same. Having just been to Rome and the south of France myself, I was fascinated by his thoughts on these things. And also fascinated by the things that have changed since the book was written!

Backpacking Around Europe
15 January 2016

tThe thing that really struck me with this book was how annoying it would have been traveling in Europe back in the late 80s and early 90s (or even earlier). Okay, automatic teller machines were starting to appear, but it wasn’t like now where you basically had a common currency over much of the continent, nor do you have to load yourself up with traveler’s cheques to make the journey. In fact I have never seen a traveler’s cheque in my life. Sure, I have heard of them, especially the famous American Express ad:

t‘Mr Wong, Mr Wong, I’ve lost all my traveler’s cheques’;
t‘oh, what kind where they’.

tAll I can say is that I felt sorry for anybody with the name Wong in the telephone book because no doubt they would gets lots of prank phones calls, and you pretty much work that out when you are the one making the prank phone call and the response is ‘and f**k you too!’. But seriously (yes, I was young once), when I first decided to leave the country and explore the world it was 2011, which meant that we had smart phones and Google Maps, it was nowhere near as frustrating, and I certainly wasn’t wandering around blind. Okay, on my first trip I didn’t have any internet access, so I was reliant upon a road map when we were driving, tourist maps when we were in a city, and basically stumbling around with my eyes bulging out at seeing Venice in the flesh.

tThe thing about travel is that it is addictive, and a book about traveling around Europe brings out the part of me that wants to say ‘stuff this, I’m out of here’. In fact I did do that once, and jumped on a plane to London simply to go and watch a live performance of Les Miserable (I had just seen the film, and staring at the poster while wandering through the London Underground just made me want to see it all the more). Fortunately that second, and third, time I did work out that the best way to deal with the internet problem is to buy simcards over there, and I have to admit that Vodafone turned out to be a life saver – namely because I ended up buying one in the Netherlands and using it for the next three weeks as I wandered around Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Pas de Calais.

tHowever, it must have been a pain in the neck having to change currencies every time you crossed the border, though my understanding was that traveler’s cheques solved that problem by being accepted wherever you go – though I suspect that you later had to cash them at a Bureau de Change, and then change currencies whenever you went into another country. Mind you, crossing from France to Switzerland, Germany to Czechia (Czech Republic), and France to England proved headaches enough, especially in Czechia where it was impossible to actually work out what the value of the money actually was. In Hong Kong I simply divided the price by 10, in the Eurozone I multiplied it by three quarters (or just hazarded a guess) and in England I basically doubled the price.

tAnother really interesting aspect to this book is when it was written. Apparently when Bryson went backpacking with his friend in the early seventies he was able to pass into the Eastern bloc, namely Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. Mind you the stories that he tells of his experience in Sofia makes you wish you were young, American, and backpacking through the Eastern Bloc in the Early Seventies. However things had changed, and Bryson was pretty fortunate that he was able to go there when he did because within a couple of years Yugoslavia would explode into a massive war. As for Bulgaria, he got to witness the breadlines first hand, though his comment about walking into his hotel and having a full buffet available is rather interesting. In fact it is also noticeable that it appears that only foreigners were even allowed in the hotel. As he said, it is surprising that he simply wasn’t mugged because it was pretty obvious that he was American, and quite a wealthy one at that (he followed in his father’s footsteps and became an editor in a London newspaper).

tI could write a lot more on this book, namely sharing my experiences in 2011 with Bryson’s in 1991, however I think I will leave that for my blog (which you can find a link here). Mind you, if you are interested in reading about my travels there is always my travel blog, and one of the main reasons that I went to Europe in 2016 was to actually have something to write about that didn’t involve suburbs in Australian cities. However, one thing that I should mention before I sign off, is how Bryson mentioned that with the collapse of Communism, tourism was only going to get worse – however it wasn’t something I noticed. In fact I suspect that what it has done is not so much brought more tourists from the Eastern Bloc – they still happen to be quite poor compared to the rest of Europe, but it has actually opened Eastern Europe to tourism.

Huh. Turns out Bryson is a dirty ol' bugger!

This travel-across-Europe journal is fun, educational and entertaining. I love travel and I like learning about far-off places. Europe has been done and overdone, yet I still find it fascinating.

Bryson's recollections are from when he wrote the book in the '90s as well as from a previous trip he and his friend Katz took. Regardless of when the reminisces come from, details ring true from the experiences I've had of the same places, such Paris and parts of Italy. Apparently some things never change. However, it was cool to get his take on the place.

At times he gets a little grumpy, but overall this is lighthearted and goodnatured. He has a adequate store of patience and his take-it-as-it-comes attitude keeps most of this from sinking into endless gripes.

Fun as this was, it's not my favorite of the six or so of Bryon's works I've read to this point. I haven't found this in his later books, but earlier on his writing seems to show a distracting obsession with sex. That's fine. I mean, I'm a dirty bird too, but I really don't want to know about the fetishes of a mid-aged man. I am one and it's not pretty. Hey, I'm sure that's someone's bag. Somewhere out there some sad sod is thinking, "I wonder what gets boring, bald and wrinkled old Phil from accounting off?" But that's not me...not yet anyhow. Who knows maybe someday my sexuality will warp in an unexpected way.

Oh, who am I kidding...*zip*

This was really good, I think it's my new favourite out of the Bill Bryson books that I've read so far.

Bill Bryson is near the top of my Most Read Authors list, not because I'm a particular fan, but because his audiobooks make easy listening for my daily walks. He doesn't attempt to do voices, I don't need to think too hard, and sometimes his stabs at humour make me laugh (and more often, make me roll my eyes). Neither Here Nor There has the advantage of being an interesting concept to me: after living in England for a dozen years, Bryson spontaneously decided to go see the Northern Lights, and after being charmed by his stay in Hammerfest, Norway -- and regretting that he had only made a handful of trips onto the continent in his dozen years on its cusp -- he decided to recreate a backpacking trip he had made through Europe when he was twenty.

This could have been very interesting -- revisiting the sites of his memories and re-evaluating cultures through his more mature viewpoint -- but that's not what Neither Here Nor There does. Instead it's a never-ending loop of Bryson: arriving in a foreign city without hotel reservations; being disappointed with the accommodations he can secure; complaining that he can't read the menus in restaurants (and constantly fearing that he will be served pig innards if he chooses unwisely); he either pays too much for not enough food or is filled comfortably at a reasonable cost; he drinks several beers with dinner while he reads a book; he walks the main boulevards and people-watches (without actually talking to anyone); he spends his days in museums, often complaining about the number of tourists that get in his way (without acknowledging that he, too, is simply one more tourist); and is usually surprised that there's no express travel route to the next city he'd like to visit. In one breath, Bryson declares that he loves to travel:

n  

Is there anything, apart from a really good chocolate cream pie and receiving a large unexpected cheque in the post, to beat finding yourself at large in a foreign city on a fair spring evening, loafing along unfamiliar streets in the long shadows of a lazy sunset, pausing to gaze in shop windows or at some church or lovely square or tranquil stretch of quayside, hesitating at street corners to decide whether that cheerful and homey restaurant you will remember fondly for years is likely to lie down this street or that one? I just love it. I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city.

n
And in the next, he's complaining:

n  

I sat on a toilet watching the (brown) water run thinking what an odd thing tourism is. You fly off to a strange land, eagerly abandoning all the comforts of home and then expend vast quantities of time and money in a largely futile effort to recapture the comforts you wouldn’t have lost if you hadn’t left home in the first place.

n

For a travel/humour writer, Bryson doesn't seem to particularly enjoy travelling, and the humour is nearly exclusively based on a kind of wearying and childish negativity:

n  

There is no scope for privacy and of course there is nothing like being trapped in a train compartment on a long journey to bring all those unassuageable little frailties of the human body crowding to the front of your mind -- the withheld fart, the three and a half square yards of boxer shorts that have somehow become concertinaed between your buttocks, the Kellogg’s corn flake that is unaccountably lodged deep in your left nostril.

n
If you find that hilarious, you might get some laughs here, but what I found even worse is the mean-spirited assessments that Bryson makes of nearly every place he visits:

n  

•tBulgaria, I reflected as I walked back to the hotel, isn’t a country; it’s a near-death experience.
•tNorwegian television gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.
•tIstanbul isn't a city, it is a collective delirium.
•tWhat do you call a gathering of boring people in Switzerland? Zurich.
•tGermans are flummoxed by humor, the Swiss have no concept of fun, the Spanish think there is nothing at all ridiculous about eating dinner at midnight, and the Italians should never, ever have been let in on the invention of the motorcar.

n
Bryson also takes many opportunities to remind the reader of the unforgiveable actions of Germany and Austria during WWII -- and I mean many opportunities -- and while I certainly agree that Nazism was one of the great evils in the history of the world, Bryson's obsession here would be like me writing a travel book about the United States and repeatedly saying, "But of course these beautiful buildings wouldn't be here if the early Americans hadn't wiped out the Indians" or "One must always remember that America can thank 200 years of slavery for the foundation of their powerful economy" (and I don't mean to be offensive with that, but Bryson rather offended me in this same vein and it's meant as analogy only). And one last complaint: even though Bryson travelled to Sofia, Bulgaria and witnessed the citizens queuing in bread lines and being barred from eating in his posh hotel restaurant, he concludes dolefully:

n  

This was 1990, the year that Communism died in Europe, and it seemed strange to me that in all the words that were written about the fall of the Iron Curtain, nobody anywhere lamented that it was the end of a noble experiment. I know that Communism never worked and I would have disliked living under it myself but none the less it seems that there was a kind of sadness in the thought that the only economic system that appeared to work was one based on self interest and greed.

n
I would have expected that assessment from the 20-year-old hippy Bryson -- not a grown-up family man who has presumably benefitted from Capitalism -- and that's probably the major failing of Neither Here Nor There: it totally misses the opportunity for reflection. Never does Bryson observe the changes that time has made in his perspectives, this is just boom boom boom -- arrive, eat, sleep, look, leave -- with occasional memories of having been in a city before (usually involving drinking and girl-chasing), throwing in barbs about what he doesn't like about a country (usually involving the ways in which it's not like America or Britain), and concludes nothing. This book was rather pointless, but at least it was easy listening.

Three and a half stars rounded up.

It’s never a good idea to read Bill Bryson on public transportation. Stifling belly laughs can be painful and the resulting noise sounds like something between strangling an aardvark and air rapidly escaping from a balloon.

The benefits: Fellow commuters won’t look you in the eye and go out of their way to avoid you, so I practically have the whole train car to myself.

This is one of Bryson’s earlier books, so it’s long on humor, random observations and anecdotes, and short on insight. He comes off as a lightweight Paul Theroux; however, I was in the mood for laughs and there are plenty contained here.

My previous Bryson book was A Walk in the Woods, so it was nice to hear more about everyone’s nightmare travelling companion, Stephen Katz, even it was via flashback. Not only does Katz have awful luck with bird’s crapping on his head, but he has the singular worst pick up line ever.

I was aimlessly wandering through Europe - which is probably the ideal situation to be in in order to maximize your enjoyment of this book - and, reading at the same snail's pace as my traveling, I shamelessly burst out laughing in trains, parks, coffee shops and even large museums. Bryson is hilarious (no question about it), he travels the best way possible (solo) and he's always cheerful as a summer morning (yes, even when he complains about stuff, it's all in good humor).

I can't help but imagine people who dislike Bryson as the many faceless, morose, omnipresent tourists who walk around in a place they've paid huge amounts of money to be in like zombies going to work on a dreary autumn day. No smile, no curious look plastered on their weary expressionless faces, no youthful joy in their eyes.

There are a lot of complains about Bryson being whiny, rich, mapless, stereotyping people and not giving enough information about the places he visits. I don't understand these complaints. He didn't come off as whiny to me, he doesn't travel like rich people do, he's not the world atlas (seriously, Italy is not that hard to find on a map; take your time and you'll even find Liechtenstein; or you could just google it, which is less cool but does the job in ~0.2s) and if you want insightful details about every country go buy a freaking travel guide! This book is not to be taken too seriously, everything is highly subjective and exaggerated for humorous purposes. Ever heard of that thing, humor? It's what makes us feel good and occasionally make fools of ourselves by laughing hysterically (you know, laugh, when you open your mouth and show your teeth even if you don't intend to stuff your face with a huge-ass burger?).

Loosen up a bit, people, get out of the country for a while and stop taking life so fucking seriously.