List love: Another 10 bookish pet peeves, travelogue and ex-pat memoir edition

If you are a regular visitor to this blog you will know that I love reading travelogues and count them as my favourite non-fiction genre. Having read so many, I have naturally discovered things that I like and dislike about them, so here is a list of 10 things that annoy me in travelogues. Not all of them are annoying enough to make me stop reading, but some of them have sufficed to make me never want to read another book by a particular author:

Authors who went on long trips to find themselves and then wrote at length about the process, disguising it as a travelogue. I much prefer the ones who travel because they're curious or because they love travelling or adventure or who travel “because”. Got-to-find-myself books tend to be too much about the author's internal struggles and feelings and not enough about the places they visit and the people they meet. Such books should really be shelved as self-help or general memoirs rather than as travelogues.
Authors who write patronisingly about the natives. This includes waxing lyrical about their innocence, quaintness or simplicity.
Hypocritical authors. For example, an author who writes disapprovingly about the rapacity and greed of, say, Indian street merchants, and then turns around and boasts about how their haggling skills saved them a few paise when dealing with them. Those paise could well be the difference between a meal and no food at all for a small businessman. One travel author, who shall remain nameless, would go on for paragraphs about how evil and useless the Catholic church was, but then didn’t hesitate to seek help from the very same church when she was in trouble in a foreign country. In the following passages I searched in vain for any sign of gratitude for the help rendered.
Those who judge a whole gender, tribe, race or nation on the basis of a few bad or good individuals.
Those who come across as overly smug about their lovely life and home abroad in expat memoirs.
Authors who moan about how tourism is going to spoil some particular place and then go on to contribute to its ruination by telling the world about its wonders in their writing.
Quirky is fine, but don’t overdo it.
Books that read like a long version of a “what I did on my [dead-ordinary] holidays” essay.
Those who clearly consider themselves to be above the people they meet, on grounds of nationality, race, gender, education or perceived moral superiority. British writers of yesteryear were particularly prone to this.
Authors who clearly didn’t travel with an open mind. How are you going to learn anything if your ideas and opinions are carved in stone before you set out?

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

Search This Blog