Well that was no "A Walk in the Woods". It was an often boring recount of an old man who ate and drank his way across Europe.

I managed to finish it, but it took a few times of setting it down because it just didn't hold my interest.

Some of this is very dated, including the views of the author, but it is still funny and informative on the whole.

Incredibly whiny and superficial - not nearly as entertaining as some of his others.

Typical Bill Bryson - very funny, very easy to read, some great anecdotes!

I like Bill Bryson. I'm a fan of Bill Bryson. But I think this was my least favorite of anything of his that I've read.

The book was written more than 20 years ago, so I tried to keep in mind that travel -- and the ease of it in Europe -- has changed a lot since then. Even so, I couldn't help but have the feeling throughout the entire thing that Bryson was some curmudgeonly old man shaking his fist and shouting "You kids get off my lawn!" I mean, half of travel is the weird stuff and the menus that you can't read and the bizarre things that would never happen "At Home" (like that shoutout to another one of his books?) but that are commonplace in whatever strange land that you're visiting. I just felt that some things shouldn't be so surprising. He writes about them anecdotally, but it's just like, well, what did you expect?

Another thing that was kind of weird is that he is constantly harking back to another trip that he took with a friend Katz (who is freakin' hilarious in A Walk in the Woods, by the way). Part of the premise of this trip is to retrace the steps that they took when traveling through Europe before. And again, some of the stories were funny, but I just kept thinking, enough with the flashbacks. I guess the point of the flashbacks in some instances were to highlight the differences in the locations over the years, but some stories were pointless.

So Bill, I didn't love this one. Not your best work. But there is a nugget of wisdom that I found written about cities, with which I wholeheartedly agree:

"I have nothing against novelty in buildings -- I am quite taken with the glass pyramid at the Louvre and those buildings at La Defense that have the huge holes in the middle -- but I just hate the way architects and city planners and everyone else responsible for urban life seems to have lost sight of what cities are for. They are for people. That seems obvious enough, but for half a century we have been building cities that are for almost anything else: for cars, for businesses, for developers, for people with money and bold visions who refuse to see cities from ground level, as places in which people must live and function and get around. Why should I have to walk through a damp tunnel and negotiate two sets of stairs to get across a bust street? Why should cars be given priority over me? How can we be so rich and so stupid at the same time? It is the curse of our century -- too much money, too little sense -- and the Pompidou seems to me a kind of celebration of that in plastic."

Typically I love Bryson’s books, but this one didn’t do it for me, and it took me an absurd amount of time to even get through it considering it’s not a long book.

A delightful celebration of the uniqueness and sameness of Europeans and their cities.

I read this as it was a present from my children. I don't really find Bryson funny and find his writing lazy - he seems to get into 'scrapes' partly out of his own laziness/bad planning and he's not very insightful.

Reading this 18 years after it was first published, it feels dated of course; but not quite old enough to be historical. The chapter of Bulgaria was more considered however.