Skip to main content

Review: You Are Awful (But I Like You) by Tim Moore

Full title: You Are Awful (But I Like You): Travels Through Unloved Britain.

I was in Manchester (the one in England) earlier in the month and thoroughly enjoyed wandering around the Christmas markets, visiting the John Rylands Library, doing a spot of Christmas shopping and eating good food. I only managed to visit one bookshop, and when I can't visit more than one, I try to make it count and therefore I chose Waterstones. The Waterstones I visited in Manchester isn't nearly as large as the big one London, but it was big enough to make me happy.

I don't really need more books and when I buy them new I try to choose ones I know or expect will become keepers. I've already been disappointed by one of my purchases (The Soul of an Octopus) and I can only hope the remaining books I bought will not be as disappointing.

The book under review here is actually one of the books I considered buying, but didn't. I then came across it second hand at a fraction of the price a couple of days after I got home, and I read it in the course of several days, and got considerable enjoyment out of it.

Inspired by a family day trip gone wrong, Tim Moore set out to visit the worst places in England, Scotland and Wales, along with the worst hotels and pubs and the ugliest buildings, all examined while on a road trip driving Britain's worst car, listening to the most awful music Britain has produced, eating  the most notoriously bad food he can find in each area and being guided by a GPS system using the voice of Ozzy Osbourne, whose Brummie accent is considered to be among Britain's ugliest.

Aside from the gimmicky nature of the trip, this book is, more than anything else, an examination of the decay of what were one productive and populous (albeit often insalubrious) industrial towns, with some formerly popular holiday destinations thrown in, attempting to analyse what went wrong with each of them. There are not a lot of laugh-aloud moments, but plenty of chuckle-worthy ones, especially when Moore is describing the problems he has with his car, and the soul-killingly awful music he forces himself to listen to while on the road.

It would be easy to write unsympathetically, even sneeringly, about these places and the people who inhabit them, but instead Moore examines (most of) them with a sympathetic eye and a kind of fascinated awe at the way time and human folly have conspired to make them awful.

It was refreshing to read a travel book about Britain not written by Bill Bryson, which does not try to emulate Bryson's style, and in fact Tim Moore's writing, which has been likened to that of Bryson, is superior. He knows how to do self-deprecating better than Bryson; his jokes, while occasionally cheap, aren't as hackneyed as Bryson's; and his writing doesn't exude the self-righteousness and indignation that often threatens to overpower everything else in Bryson's writing. This one is going on the keeper shelf.


Comments

Ole Phat Stu said…
Just reading it on your recommendation.
But how godawful boring it is ; I suppose that is what the author was aiming for. But I'll stick with lukewarm Bryson thankyou.
I'll finish it to see if it gets any better, but I somehow doubt it.

Popular posts from this blog

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...