Dawn's Reading Blog

The Conde Nast Traveler Book of Unforgettable Journeys is a collection of travel essays from the magazine. I don’t think I’d like this magazine. Although some of the places are interesting, and some of the writing was approachable, the overall style seems to be to cram as many facts, names, dates, and titles into each sentence. Sort of like this:

The arch, 112 feet at its apex and made of grey granite harvested from the coal mines of Goldospato, Austria, was constructed in January 1942, at the height of World War II and before General Schwartkopf was born, to commemorate the fall of Napolean, who is pictured wearing the regional coat of arms common to all first born sons of potatoe farmers during the Crimean War when termites overcame the elephants by eating their feed, much as they did in Atilla’s day.

Or something.

First we had Frommer’s Italy 2007 because we had done well with Frommer’s in Paris, but we quickly realized it was too generic. We were planning to go to three specific places in Italy: Rome, Florence, and Siena and we weren’t planning any drives around the countryside. So then we got Rick Steves’ Florence and Tuscany which covered Florence and Siena and Rick Steves’ Rome.

We were really happy with the Rick Steves books. They go a step beyond Frommer’s by giving you tours of the individual sights for the more important museums, churches, and ruins. Considering how much we were trying to pack into such a short time, it was extremely helpful to know what the important pieces were at each sight. On top of that, his descriptions are humorous and illuminating. He tells you not just which items are important but why they’re important and how to appreciate them, including contextual historical information where needed. I don’t think we’ll travel without Rick again.

For maps we had the Knopf Mapguides for Rome and Florence. Each book has six fold-out maps showing a section of the city. The maps were accurate (no small task with Florence’s tiny, windy streets) and durable. My only complaint is that the overview map, which showed the six sections connected plus the pieces that were outside the six sections, was way too small to be useful. The books also show the major sights in each section of the map, which is good for basic orientation, but they’re no substitute for a real guidebook. The information given with respect to hours was frequently inaccurate.

My mother and I are planning a trip to Italy in October. We’re planning to visit three cities: Rome, Florence, and Siena. In preparation, I’ve been reviewing guidebooks to Florence and Siena.

Knopff’s Mapguide is more of a map than a guidebook. It hasn’t been revised since 2005 so the hours are dubious but the six maps are well done and the major attractions are clearly marked. It feels like it’ll hold up well and the foldout construction is convenient. Having the city marked into separate sections (even if somewhat arbitrarily) is handy as well. It’s nice to be able to group attractions. I’d expect to be carrying this with us on days we’re in Florence. This book doesn’t cover Siena at all.

Rick Steve’s Florence & Tuscany 2007 covers both Florence and Siena (and other Tuscan towns) and we’re vehemently assured that it’s thoroughly up to date by Rick himself. About half the book is Florence. Siena gets the coverage it needs. It’s well organized, contains some excellent travel tips, and covers the highlights in great detail. He includes a separate “tour guide” for most of the major attractions that tells you what to see there and which order to see it in. I don’t know if we’ll follow his tours that explicitly but they look like they’d be good to read before the visit so we’ll know if there are particular works of art we should be looking for. My mother felt like we’d missed some in Paris.

The book also has suggestions for walking tours. Those will be very nice if they’re accurate. We tried to do a couple of walking tours from the Frommer’s Paris guide and ended up frustrated and lost. It seemed like it worked better if I mapped our route between attractions based mainly on getting there by major streets. This is definitely the book we’ll use most and I don’t feel the need for another one, although one thing it is lacking is any kind of handy pull-out map. Rick Steve suggests picking up a map at a TI there. We had a free map like that in Paris that was better than anything we’d bought at home, so we’ll certainly do that.

Frommer’s Italy 2007 tries to cover all of Italy and as such it fails to cover much of Florence or Siena. The book has more to say about Rome but even there it’s not at the level of their Paris guide which we found excellent. Lesson learned – find the most specific book on the area that you can, even if you’re visiting multiple areas.

The Places in Between was named one of the best books of the year by someone or other. It didn’t do that much for me. Although I’m sure it was an impressive journey – walking across post-Taliban Afghanistan and through snow-covered passes – it’s not an impressive book. There’s no common theme or dramatic impact. It’s the worst of travel writing, where you find out too much about what specifically happened and not enough about something more universally applicable.

It does do a good job of making the point that most Afghanistans having very little knowledge about what’s going on with world politics and they certainly aren’t participating. These people barely know what’s going on in the next town over and they’re too busy fighting, or being afraid of, each other to bother with us.

My mother and I are going to Paris at the end of October so I purchased Frommer’s Paris 2006 as a reference. It’s well laid out and covers museums, restaurants, attractions, and some nice walks. It also has a metro map and a pull out street map. Although there’s not much in there that’s unique (all the guidebooks seem to have the same stuff), it’s very complete. I’m looking forward to the trip.

The Thong Also Rises is another in the Whose Panties are These series of humorous travel stories written by women. They make great travel books and I read this one on my trip to the Dolomites where I was having adventures of my own that would fit pretty nicely into this series.

The book may be called A Walk in the Woods, but he sure doesn’t do as much walking as I’d expected him to do. There’s a lot of background information on the trail and some chapters on other things going on his life, preparation and so on. Few of the chapters involve his actual experiences on the trail and he walks much less of it than I’d assumed (I suppose I thought he’d done the whole thing). But an enjoyable read and the educational parts are interspersed with more entertaining parts so it doesn’t get tedious.

But I wouldn’t have missed it for the world! is hard to categorize. I was looking for a travelogue. It’s not quite that. It’s humorous in spots, though not always. It has some recipes, oddly. It has some travel tips, almost all of which are amusingly out of date. It’s more a collection of anecdotes than anything else, very loosely centered on travelling and other cultures. Kind of an interesting read, but mostly for the anachornisms.

The most amazing thing about Dear Friends and Darling Romans is that you can still buy it on Amazon. How is this not out of print? It’s a cute travellogue, written in the 1950s, by an American woman who ended up living in Italy for years. It’s entertaining and heartfelt. It’s also terribly out of date, of course. I wonder if that Italy still exists or if we only want to believe it does.

Mostly humorous, the book meanders from topic to topic. She’s involved in a court case, lives in various places, shops. At one point she tells the stories of a few other women (probably apocryphal) and their Italian romances. She doesn’t seem to need to earn a living but isn’t living the socialite life either. It’s a sweet, homey book that won’t make you think but that goes a little deeper than the usual stereotypes.

I don’t know Rick Steves. I’ve never seen his TV show, taken one of his tours, or used one of his guidebooks. Perhaps if I had I’d have found his Postcards from Europe more interesting. The book follows him on a whirlwind tour of Europe, revisiting many of the places he takes his tour groups or has written about in his guidebooks. The trip is so quick (no more than two days in any city) that we don’t really learn anything about the places he visits.

In his defense, the book is supposed to be more about people than about places. But it fails on that level too. Conversations that clearly never happened are repeated to illustrate various cultural stereotypes: Italians talk with their hands and ogle women; the French don’t shower and are rude; Americans are in a hurry and expect modern conveniences; Even if these sterotypes are true, they’re nothing new.

The most interesting parts of the book are his recollections of past trips and the stories about how he got into the travel business. The older stories have the ring of truth and the adventures he recounts are spontaneous, not planned for the purpose of retelling.

At the end of the book he acknowledges that the conversations are fictionalized and that the trip didn’t really happen that way, that it was really three trips he’s strung together. The revelation is hardly a surprise. The book reads that way. I think it’s a mistake to take a trip just so you can write a book about it. You can’t force interesting conversations and experiences. First you should have the interesting conversations and experiences and then you should look back on them and say, “hey, that would make a good book” and then maybe you’d have a good book.