when that bill bryson guy traveled in europe...

Book One

In the fake war that has emerged between these two accidental combatants, courtesy of being read one after the other, Book One (aka: The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald), as pictured at left, versus Book Two (aka: Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe by Bill Bryson), see photo below, Book One wins hands down in the design category. It has the kind of cover that's frame-able and full of all kinds of writerly inspiration. Book Two was definitely not selected based on the merits of its very, very uninspiring yellow jersey.

But...

I've recently finished reading Book One, mostly out of sheer determination and maybe partly to honor its gorgeous cover. Take all the depressing parts of The Great Gatsby and make them much longer, and that's this book. But I suspect there's something redeeming to be found, I just wish I had a book group to help me find it. And to be sure, there were a few passages that I noted with my reading pencil for their turns of phrase or literary merit. But mostly, I was so very glad to finish the book and move on to Book Two.

I'd never heard of Bill Bryson before my 2007 four-month escapade to Africa, but once there, I began to find his books prominently featured in bookstores across the continent, or at least the ones I went to in Kampala, Uganda and Cape Town, South Africa. Who was this ubiquitous guy? Once upon a time sometime after Africa, I finally read I'm a Stranger Here Myself, but, well, I didn't love it. What I read there did not merit this

Book Two

international notoriety I'd witnessed. But then I heard that that book was not his finest shining moment, so I gave him another try and picked up this ugly used edition from his vast oeuvre at the English bookshop in Aix-en-Provence. Determining the quality of the work within Book Two would clearly not in any way be affected by any assist from its cover.

So, anyway, that's the tome I'm reading now and enjoying more than poor Book One. And since I don't have a book group to discuss these things with, here are a couple of my fave quotes so far...

Chapter 3 - Oslo

"One of the small marvels of my first trip to Europe was the discovery that the world could be so full of variety, that there were so many different ways of doing essentially identical things, like eating and drinking and buying cinema tickets. It fascinated me that Europeans could at once be so alike--that they could be so universally bookish and cerebral, and drive small cars, and live in little houses in ancient towns, and love soccer, and be relatively unmaterialistic and law-abiding, and have chilly hotel rooms and cozy and inviting places to eat and drink--and yet be so endlessly, unpredictably different from one another as well. I loved the idea that you could never be sure of anything in Europe."

This is just really nicely said. Especially apropos while living in Provence is that part about living in little houses in ancient towns. There are so many ancient towns here that, well, after three years here I kind of understand how people eventually just have to get on with their lives. You can't necessarily drink in the wonder of your ancient town every single day.  At some point you have to stop wondering and wash your dishes already.

"When I told friends in London that I was going to travel around Europe and write a book about it, they said, 'Oh, you must speak a lot of languages.' 'Why, no,' I would reply with a certain pride, 'only English,' and they would look at me as if I were crazy. But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses."

Personally, I think what I enjoy more than the not-knowing is the feeling of accomplishment when you break the code and manage to understand anything at all because you've put all the clues together and deduced some aspect of heretofor unknown humanity.

Chapter 4 - Paris

"...at least [the hotel] didn't have those curious timer switches that used to be a feature of hotel hallways in France. These were a revelation to me when I first arrived from America. All the light switches in the hallways were timed to switch off after ten or fifteen seconds, presumably as an economy measure. This wasn't so bad if your room was next to the elevator, but if it was very far down the hall, and hotel hallways in Paris tend to wander around like an old man with Alzheimer's, you would generally proceed the last furlong in total blackness, feeling your way along the walls with flattened palms, and in invariably colliding scrotally with the corner of a nineteenth-century oak table put there, evidently, for that purpose."

Maybe the hotels have done away with these, but apartment buildings here sure haven't. You haven't lived in France until you've been trapped going up or down stairs when the light times out. Sometimes the switches have glowing lights to announce where they are on the wall, but not always. It's even better when you're moving in or out of an apartment or just plain carrying anything of substantive size (which is common since, you know, there's often no elevator, so anything that enters your house has to be carried up stairs). Stairs become very treacherous in the dark. It's the kind of thing horror stories are made of, and you don't even need to pay a scary bad guy to show up. This kind of horror is very, very cheap.