Bonus book review: It’s Not About the Tapas (travel)

Author: Polly Evans
Year published: 2003
Pages: 304
Genre: non-fiction, travel, Spain

Polly Evans, fed up with her stressful job as a journalist/editor in Hong Kong, decided to take a nice, long holiday. The obvious choice was Spain, where she had once spent a year, and so spoke the language after a fashion. She had a road bicycle built, light and strong, that would be her conveyance for the journey, and set off. The book tells of her journey, her adventures, people (and animals) she met, places she visited, along with some snippets of history. The first leg of the journey took her along the border with France, and the second through the Extremadura region in southern central Spain.

It was the title that grabbed my attention when browsing for books on TitleTrader. I checked the reviews on Amazon, saw the book was about travelling in Spain, where I spent two enjoyable weeks a couple of years ago, so I sent in a request and got the book within two weeks. For once, I was not disappointed.

Several times I have seen travel books that looked interesting, and which turned out to be disappointing. One such was a recent highly lauded book about cycling the route of the 2000 Tour de France, Tim Moore’s French Revolutions. I have no intention of comparing the two in detail, but I will say that when it comes to being funny, Polly Evans kicks Tim Moore’s sore arse. She is in some ways not as skilful a writer as Moore (this being her first book and suffering slightly from firstbookitis*), but she makes up for it by being far funnier, and I fully expect that her writing skill has improved with her next two books (about China and New Zealand, both of which I am looking forward to read). She certainly has mastered the quip, often dropping one when least expected. She also never crosses the line where self-deprecating humour turns into a self-pitying whinge. Neither does she gloss over her problems, of being out of shape and having forgotten, during her training period, that she was going to be riding with panniers full of stuff that would weigh down the bicycle and change its balance, or the fact that she knew nothing about bicycle repair - both, incidentally, problems shared with Moore.

As I mentioned before, there is are slight symptoms of firstbookitis, nothing that writing a second book can’t fix. The story feels a bit fragmented in places. There is also some unnecessary repetition (her problems with big traffic roads, for example, are repeated so often that you expect a big climactic scene of either conquering her fear and loathing or having an accident, but nothing comes of it). But these are minor problems. For the most part the book is well written, and she cleverly interweaves the historical information with her own experiences of the places she visited. 4 stars.

* firstbookitis = common mistakes in author’s first books

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down ...

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went...

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...

Reading in Reykjavík

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