This book was my biggest disappointment when I read it, something like 12 or 13 years ago. It was before I first went anywhere outside my country, so I was really thrilled to read any travel books. Even though the book looked good at the beginning, soon it began to become annoying. The author tries to make the book funny, but it still is not. It looks very shallow, the jokes are no better than high-school level. The profusion of toilet humor is truly disheartening. Oh man, you’re in Paris, you go to Louvre and all you tell us is: 1. Mona Lisa is small, far-away and hard to see; 2. I found a painting where one lady “plugged” her finger into “the other’s fundament”; 3. I went to find my friend to show him this, he was drinking Coke and told me he had to pay two francs to go and pee in men’s room; 4. I told my friend that a bird shit on his head, but then a bird really did it. Seriously, why? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a stuck-up or some kind of arty person, nor am I a prude. But there is too much of this stuff where there shouldn’t be. Or maybe, it’s just American humor that I don’t get.
Anyway, I expected way more from this book. I was looking for interesting experiences and observations but not those inappropriate stories and weird judgements of a person who comes to a different continent and complains about places being different from his home.

Funny at times, but other times I was shocked/ disappointed by his commentary. Written in the 1990’s it did make me appreciate the internet and my credit card that doesn’t charge international rates. I can’t imagine having to use travelers checks or just showing up in a city and having to find a hotel without having a reservation.

This is a hideous narrative of a privileged, white male traipsing through Europe without hotel reservations and expecting everything to be ready and waiting for him. This book is nothing like Bryson's "A Walk In The Woods", which I found quite entertaining. "Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe" is a sexist tome in which Bryson repeatedly comments on the features and anatomy of women in the various countries he visits. His commentary has a condescending, elitist tone and his brand of "tongue in cheek" humor is at times downright mean. I couldn't finish this book because I found it more tedious to read the further I progressed. This will be the last work from Bill Bryson I waste my time with. If I had a fireplace or a wood stove, I'd use it for kindling.

I will not read it here nor there,
I will not read Bill Bryson anywhere.

The beginning of a hilarious on again off again journey with Bill Bryson and Steven Katz.

Bill Bryson's book 'Neither Here nor There' is hilarious. This is a travelogue about a journey through Europe which could easily pass as a stand-up comedian's dialogue.

The book was written in 1992, so I am certain a lot of the author's descriptions of hotels, streets, restaurants, museums, landscapes, cities, trains and people he saw on his journey through Europe are lacking somewhat in current usefulness to travelers hoping to see exactly today what he saw back then almost thirty years ago. However, the book is so funny it is worth the read.

There often is an over-the-top, unhelpful satirical commentary running in the privacy of my mind as I muse over dark, sad, ugly or cruel things. I frequently suffer from existential depression, and for some reason, an exaggerated feeling of humor-infused hysteria often accompanies my inner sense of doom and gloom. Bryson says all of what he is thinking, no matter how inappropriately satirical, out openly on the printed page. To my astonishment, he clearly is a writer who often feels the world as I do.


Examples:

"The owner says: ""Is he bothering you?"" I answer: ""No, Jim, I adore it when a dog gets his teeth around my balls and frantically rubs the side of my head with his rear leg."" ""I can put him out if he's bothering you,"" the owner adds. Hey, I want to reply, don't put him out, put him down."


"To my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you. They are harmless, they look nice, they don't need a box to crap in, they keep the grass down, and they are so trusting and stupid that you can't help lose your heart to them. Where I live in Yorkshire, there's a herd of cows down the lane. You can stand by the wall at any hour of the day or night, and after a minute the cows will all waddle over and stand with you, much too stupid to know what to do next, but happy to be with you. They will stand there all day, as far as I can tell, possibly till the end of time. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends forever. And when you get tired of them, you can kill them and eat them. Perfect."


"In the middle of the table sat a large cast-iron platter, which I assumed was an ashtray, and then I had the unsettling thought that perhaps it was some kind of food receptacle and that the waitress would come along in a minute and put some bread in it. I looked around the room to see if any of the other few customers were using theirs as an ashtray, but no one seemed to be, so I snatched out my cigarette butt and dead match and secreted them in a pot plant beside the table, and then tried to disperse the ash by blowing, but the ash went all over the tablecloth. As I tried to brush it away, I knocked my glass with the side of my hand and slopped beer all across the table."

"By the time I had finished, much of the tablecloth was a series of gray smudges outlined in a large, irregular patch of yellow that looked distressingly like a urine stain. I casually tried to hide this with my elbow and upper body when the waitress brought my dinner, but she saw instantly what a mess I had made of things and gave me a look not of contempt, as I had dreaded, but--worse--of sympathy. It was the look you might give a stroke victim who has lost control over the muscles of his mouth but is still gamely trying to feed himself."

"For one horrible moment, I thought she might tie a napkin around my neck and cut up my food for me. Instead, she retreated to her station behind the bar, but she kept a compassionate eye on me throughout the meal, ready to spring forward if any pieces of cutlery should clatter from my grasp of if a sudden spasm cause me to tip over backward. I was very pleased to get out of there. The cast-iron platter was an ashtray, by the way."


"But back then I was too meek to do anything but listen politely and utter non-committal ""hmmmmms"" to their suggestions that Jesus could turn my life around. Somewhere over the Atlantic, as I was sitting taking stock of my two hundred cubic centimeters of personal space, as one does on a long plane flight, I spied a coin under the seat in front of me, and with protracted difficulty leaned forward and snagged it. When I sat up, I saw my seatmate was at last looking at me with that ominous glow. [He spent most of the flight reading Holy Scripture, moving both sets of fingertips across each line of text as he read and voicing the words just loud enough for me to hear them as a fervent whisper in my right ear.]"

""Have you found Jesus?"" he asked suddenly."

""Uh, no, it's a quarter"" I answered and quickly settled down and pretended for the next six hours to be asleep, ignoring his whispered entreaties to let Christ build a bunkhouse in my heart."


"In my lonely, enfeebled state, I began to think about my old hometown diner. It was called the Y Not Grill, which everyone assumed was short for Y Not Come In and Get Food Poisoning."....."The Y Not had a waitress named Shirley who was the most unpleasant person I have ever met. Whatever you ordered, she would look as if you just asked to borrow her car to take her daughter to Tijuana for a filthy weekend. ""You want what?"" she would say. ""A guinea grinder and onion rings,"" you would repeat apologetically. ""Please, Shirley. If it's not too much trouble. When you get a minute.""

"Shirley would stare at you for up to five minutes, as if memorizing your features for the police report, then scrawl the order on a pad and shout out to the cook in the curious dopey lingo they use in diners: ""Two loose stools and a bucket of mud,"" or whatever."


I just about died laughing when I read the above paragraphs I have copied out, and I was guffawing loudly several other times while reading this book. I don't care that the book is dated - it is a very funny travelogue.

The author visited towns and cities in Norway, France, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, Yugoslavia and Turkey. He writes in telling vignettes his impressions of hotels, people, street life, landscapes and museums. He is extremely amusing whether he enjoyed being a visitor somewhere or not. Gentle reader, besides that the book is out-of-date in regards to current conditions in the countries he traveled through, he is sometimes not very PC. There is an index included.

I liked this well enough, but doesn't think it compares to Notes from a Small Island or Home. Still, it's very good and entertaining, as Bryson always is. It is lacking, I think, all the random little facts you usually learn from his stuff and then proceed to bombard friends/family with. Still worth reading!

My third and, by far, least favorite Bryson book. Outdated, repetitive, and frequently distasteful (even for him). I couldn’t wait for this to be over. If it wasn’t my last book of my reading challenge for the year, I probably would’ve abandoned it