Skip to main content

Tourists with Typewriters – Critical reflections on contemporary travel writing

Originally published in December 2004, in 3 parts.
Book 44 in my first 52 books challenge.

Author: Patrick Holland & Graham Huggan
Year published: 1998
Pages: 261
Genre: Historiography, criticism and history
Sub-genre(s): Travel writing
Where got: National/University Library

Whenever I go browsing at the National/University Library I come across books on all sorts of interesting subjects. One of my haunts is the travel and geography section, where I have found many great reads about travel, which is without doubt my favourite genre. The last time I visited the library I ventured into the literary theory section, where I found this interesting book about travel writing and writers. The bibliography alone has given me a substantial number of books to add to my TBR list.

Part 2:
Tourists with Typewriters: Reading progress
Try as I may, I can’t get into this book. I read a few pages and find myself dozing off. In 5 days I have only got as far as finishing the introduction and chapter 1.
I may have to declare my first failure of this challenge – but first I’m going to browse a few pages of each chapter and see if it gets better.

It’s not that it isn’t interesting – it is – but it’s so dry, it’s like being in the desert with only salt water to drink: you desperately want it, but it isn’t good for you.

Part 3:
I’m giving up on Tourists with Typewriters...
I’ve decided to drop the book of the week because I just can’t concentrate on it.

It’s unfortunate when such an interesting subject gets written about in a less than interesting way. No subject needs to be boring if the writer knows her/his craft. Even economics can be made interesting to a layperson by a skilled writer, but if the writer is not able to write interestingly, the text can turn out dry as a mummy.

For some reason, academic writers seem to especially adept at writing boring texts. It’s almost as if in the land of Academia it is forbidden to write texts that can keep a person’s attention for more than five minutes at a time. In my opinion, academic writers should take lessons from writers of popular non-fiction, because it is definitely not serving Education when the text books are so boring that the students fall asleep reading them.

I plan to try again on my summer vacation when I have more time and fewer other things on my mind, and will review it if I get round to it.

Note: I never did get round to it.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to make a simple origami bookmark

Here are some instructions on how to make a simple origami (paper folding) bookmark: Take a square of paper. It can be patterned origami paper, gift paper or even office paper, just as long as it’s easy to fold. The square should not be much bigger than 10 cm/4 inches across, unless you intend to use the mark for a big book. The images show what the paper should look like after you follow each step of the instructions. The two sides of the paper are shown in different colours to make things easier, and the edges and fold lines are shown as black lines. Fold the paper in half diagonally (corner to corner), and then unfold. Repeat with the other two corners. This is to find the middle and to make the rest of the folding easier. If the paper is thick or stiff it can help to reverse the folds. Fold three of the corners in so that they meet in the middle. You now have a piece of paper resembling an open envelope. For the next two steps, ignore the flap. Fold the square diagonally in two. Yo...
25 comments
Read more

Bibliophile discusses Van Dine’s rules for writing detective stories

Writers have been putting down advice for wannabe writers for centuries, about everything from how to captivate readers to how to build a story and write believable characters to getting published. The mystery genre has had its fair share, and one of the best known advisory essays is mystery writer’s S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 piece “Twenty rules for writing detective stories.” I mentioned in one of my reviews that I might write about these rules. Well, I finally gave myself the time to do it. First comes the rule (condensed), then what I think about it. Here are the Rules as Van Dine wrote them . (Incidentally, check out the rest of this excellent mystery reader’s resource: Gaslight ) The rules are meant to apply to whodunnit amateur detective fiction, but the main ones can be applied to police and P.I. fiction as well. I will discuss them mostly in this context, but will also mention genres where the rules don’t apply and authors who have successfully and unsuccessfully broken the rules. 1...
9 comments
Read more