Book Reviews

As I said in an earlier post, I’ve been quite busy doing some behind-the-scenes reading. I thought it would be fun to use my blog as a place to do some reviews. I’ll be writing about two books: Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love, and Alice Steinbach’s Without Reservations.

So shall I start with the good or the bad? I’m thinking that maybe I should get the bad out of the way so that we can end on a good note. So here goes…

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert – Hmmm…where to begin? First off, if any bookstore owners, stockers, etc are reading this then can you please do everyone a favor and leave this book out of the travel section? I noticed that this book had been on the NYT Bestseller’s List for quite a while, and when I read the blurb on the back I put it back on the shelf. Even though the author goes to some cool places (Italy, India, and Indonesia), it didn’t seem like a book I would be interested in. Having said that, I’m not sure why I finally decided to pick it up. Once I start reading a book I can’t put it down – and this book made me lament this about myself.

Here’s the thing. She wrote a third of the book about Italy. How much does she talk about Italy? Hardly at all. I can sum up the Italy chapter for you: I’m getting a divorce; I cry; I’m sleeping with a new guy; I cry; I’m on pills; I cry; I’m rich; I cry; divorce is painful so I sleep with boyfriend more; I cry; more pills; Italian language lessons; I need more pills; I cry… Ok, you get the picture. I think there are about 8 pages devoted to Italy itself.

The India chapter takes place in an Ashram where the author meditates and reflects about her life. So you don’t get to hear much about India either. Indonesia? Now this is a great chapter. Finally, she decides to not write about how big of a flake she is, and she begins to focus on her surroundings – the landscape, the people she interacts with, the traditions and customs in Bali, and her experiences there. It was a great chapter. It made me want to go to Bali…

…which is exactly what a travel book should do. Now, some may argue that the author never meant for it to be a travel book. That just because she visited these 3 different countries, the book was a focus her struggle with herself – in which she happened to be in those places. And that’s fair. However, like I said earlier, take it out of the travel section so that innocent and unassuming readers such as myself don’t expect something that the book isn’t. So maybe it’s more fair of me to say that the marketing of the book is terrible versus the book itself.

Huh. Maybe that wasn’t so harsh. If you want harsh, it might be fun for you to read travel writer Rolf Potts’s opinion of the book.

——

Now, a book that I read recently and actually liked is Without Reservations. This book was everything that I thought Eat, Pray, Love was going to be. It begins when the author decides that she’s at a point in her life where she needs a change and decides to take a leave of absence from her job at the local newspaper to travel. She starts in Paris, then goes to London and Oxford, and ends her romp around the continent in Italy. The book has powerful descriptions of the cities, and the focus of the story is on the author’s experiences in Europe – it’s a far cry from the ‘woe is me’ tale that E GILBERT wrote.

And that’s all I’m going to say about Without Reservations. I know I wrote a lot more about Eat, Pray, Love, but that’s because I don’t want anyone to make the same mistake that I did in reading it. Without Reservations, on the other hand, speaks for itself and I would definitely recommend the book. I don’t want to write anything else about it in hopes that you’ll read it for yourself to see how great it is.