I recently read an interview with Bill Bryson in an intermission magazine at a play, and was immediately hooked. Here, I thought, was a man who had clearly had some experiences worth sharing. So I immediately checked out several of his books from the library to see if my first impression was correct. And boy, was it. Bryson has an absolute way with words. He is humorous but vividly romantic in his descriptions of landscape and people, and while reading about his multiple European excursions I felt transported, not only into his experience, but back with glorious nostalgia into my own adventures across the pond. Even if you have never been to Europe yourself, this book is definitely worth reading. This is a memoir that is oozing with fondness for times past and is replete with genuine sentimentality that does not become gooey or obnoxious. I am looking forward into my next Bryson book, and anticipate reading through his entire body of work before I am satisfied.

"I sat on a toilet watching the 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."

Well that was no "A Walk in the Woods". It was an often boring recount of an old man who ate and drank his way across Europe.

I managed to finish it, but it took a few times of setting it down because it just didn't hold my interest.

Some of this is very dated, including the views of the author, but it is still funny and informative on the whole.

Incredibly whiny and superficial - not nearly as entertaining as some of his others.

Typical Bill Bryson - very funny, very easy to read, some great anecdotes!

I like Bill Bryson. I'm a fan of Bill Bryson. But I think this was my least favorite of anything of his that I've read.

The book was written more than 20 years ago, so I tried to keep in mind that travel -- and the ease of it in Europe -- has changed a lot since then. Even so, I couldn't help but have the feeling throughout the entire thing that Bryson was some curmudgeonly old man shaking his fist and shouting "You kids get off my lawn!" I mean, half of travel is the weird stuff and the menus that you can't read and the bizarre things that would never happen "At Home" (like that shoutout to another one of his books?) but that are commonplace in whatever strange land that you're visiting. I just felt that some things shouldn't be so surprising. He writes about them anecdotally, but it's just like, well, what did you expect?

Another thing that was kind of weird is that he is constantly harking back to another trip that he took with a friend Katz (who is freakin' hilarious in A Walk in the Woods, by the way). Part of the premise of this trip is to retrace the steps that they took when traveling through Europe before. And again, some of the stories were funny, but I just kept thinking, enough with the flashbacks. I guess the point of the flashbacks in some instances were to highlight the differences in the locations over the years, but some stories were pointless.

So Bill, I didn't love this one. Not your best work. But there is a nugget of wisdom that I found written about cities, with which I wholeheartedly agree:

"I have nothing against novelty in buildings -- I am quite taken with the glass pyramid at the Louvre and those buildings at La Defense that have the huge holes in the middle -- but I just hate the way architects and city planners and everyone else responsible for urban life seems to have lost sight of what cities are for. They are for people. That seems obvious enough, but for half a century we have been building cities that are for almost anything else: for cars, for businesses, for developers, for people with money and bold visions who refuse to see cities from ground level, as places in which people must live and function and get around. Why should I have to walk through a damp tunnel and negotiate two sets of stairs to get across a bust street? Why should cars be given priority over me? How can we be so rich and so stupid at the same time? It is the curse of our century -- too much money, too little sense -- and the Pompidou seems to me a kind of celebration of that in plastic."