Europe- More Blissful Travel

As I get older and due to restricted movement, my adult years of travel have come to end. This new chapter of my journey I hate with avengence. When I was able to travel, I rarely read travel books as I was too busy doing my own travel with my own many adventures. Now I copiously read/listen to travel books to satisfy my hunger.
Bill Bryson is my saviour and medicine.
This book covers many places I have visited in Europe. It is so beautifully descriptive of local customs of past and present, the people, the scenery, the good and the bad of travel and has so much belly laughter humour.
This trip is ideal for anyone wanting to visit Europe with Bill Bryson - it’s another great journey...thanks Bill

12 people found this helpful

A must listen!

Bryson's ability to succinctly describe every day things with such wit and humour is just magical. I really could listen indefinitely! I'm looking forward to listening to the few books from Bill that I've got left.
William Roberts describes the adventures and observations in such a wonderful way. I think the narration is as close to perfect as one could hope to get..
Highly recommended..

15 people found this helpful

Hilariously discriptive and Brilliant

Bill has a great expressive word power. He describes the situations, people and places with brilliance. His descriptive account of European travels creates an enjoyable picture to the listeners. I enjoyed the audio and got hooked on it.

12 people found this helpful

decent enough, but this has dated!

Would you listen to Neither Here nor There again? Why?

No.I loved Notes from a Small Island the moment I picked it up. For a while back in the mid '90s I couldn't get enought Bryson. Listening to this audio book of Neither Her nor There brought a lot of pleasant memories back, but it also showed it as a somewhat dated "Daily Mail Reader Tours Europe" (even though he hates the Daily Mail). I think the somewhat irritating tones of the narrator (William Roberts) didn't help things here. My wife couldn't bear to listen to it. There seemed to be way too many antagonistic remarks about pretty much any country/people (which I know is somewhat the point), but it rather undid all it's good work some 20 years later and I began to wonder why the hell he bothered travelling at all, if he felt this way? Funny though it still is in large parts, it has a mildly icky undertaste that's a little patronising by the standards of 2017

What other book might you compare Neither Here nor There to, and why?

Notes from a Small Island - similar vintage Bryson. The Road to Little Dribbling - more contemporary, if slightly less funny

Did William Roberts do a good job differentiating each of the characters? How?

Not really many characters to speak of. Even so, his tone is a bit whiny and I think this dragged the funnier elements of the book down, making it sound like an American-knows-best kind of rant.

Any additional comments?

Remarking on all the bare-breasted women sunning themselves in parks might be the kind of comment made by middle-aged men (or teenagers) to their friends (in private, without being mic'd up) but devoting a vast chunk of a chapter of a book to it borders on the embarassing

17 people found this helpful

Was thinking of stoppong half way through

Would you try another book written by Bill Bryson or narrated by William Roberts?

No, although I liked some of the humour and the sarcasm, the narration was so annoying.

Any additional comments?

Althoug the book is about stereotypes, unfortunately a lot of them are very outdated. Woman in germany dont shave under the armpits? Split a stinking city, Sofia communistic....didnt want to make the effort to see Cologne after first impression, but went back in Itaky to the same poor city and walked through it.

Got into way too many details at times. I enjoyed the hunour and sarcasm in some parts and then was about to stop when I listened for 5 minutes about some unnecessary details. Could have been half the size the book.

8 people found this helpful

Gross old man describes what turns him on. Avoid!

I've liked some of Bill Bryson's books, for instance Down Under and A walk in the woods. I did notice that he is pretty sexist and sometimes racist in that casual, midwestern American kind of way. In pretty much every book he writes there will be multiple disparaging remarks about women, especially if they are over thirty or not thin. Or he'll make a passing comment that makes you think 'Errrr... That wouldn't fly anymore today'. I kind of chalked it up to some of these books being pretty old (20-30 years ago). There was still enough fun stuff in them to kind of be OK with it. But they've made me feel a bit ick afterwards, despite some of the good jokes in them. I also listened to them for free (plus) so my standards were a little lower. Then I listened to his book about America and the way he speaks about women is just so cruel and unnecessary. If you google his picture, you'll see that he is not exactly eye-candy. But he freely discusses the looks of others. Every woman he meets is basically rated in terms of his attraction to them, or their subservience to him. If you are a chubby 40 year old waitress who doesn't drop everything instantly to indulge his every whim right now, you WILL be ridiculed and spoken about as if you are utterly disgusting and should just kill yourself. He literally says this at some point. If you are fat and he sees you, there will be a comment about how gigantic your behind is (in ruder words) and how that makes you inferior. As opposed to his mediocre chubby man appearance, I guess.

I'm not sure why I started this book after that. Because it was free, probably. But this one is even worse. He happily discusses wanting to grope unconscious women, creeping on girls working in service positions, how much of a turn on the white cotton panties of schoolgirls are to him, the looks of every woman he comes across, all the whores (his words) in Amsterdam, It is just one list of gross remarks after the other. Too many to list. He turns it up a notch into racist territory when describing the red light district. He states that all the 'whores' used to be so lovely over there, Dutch, beautiful and friendly. But now they are 'all Asian and African', and they look 'hard and mean'. Not once does he seem to realize how racist that sounds, or reflect on the fact that maybe these ladies aren't so friendly to him because he is trying to oggle them for free and they are most likely trafficked.

All this was enough for me to delete all the remaining plus books by this author. I think his more recent works are less sexist and racist, if only because his editors will have intervened by now. But his personality shines through SO clearly in all of them once you catch on to his schtick. He likes young, thin, white girls, and thinks everything that isn't that, is inferior. Not just unattractive to him, but beings that should be erased because he does not like to look at them. All this is brought in a whiny tone, with comments that are supposed to be 'jokes', but are really just excuses to rag on anything that isn't attractive to him. I also noticed that he easily throws his friends under the bus (for instance Katz in multiple books) and has no problem portraying people that try to help him in an unkind way. He's just a very self-centered man. Occasionally funny. But not funny enough for this to be acceptable to me anymore. I guess this type of book will speak to you if you are a certain type of guy. Hence some of the positive reviews. If you are not that demographic, avoid. It's gross.

3 people found this helpful

Never before have I been so antagonised by a book

I've previously read and enjoyed excerpts from BB books so I quite looked forward to this experience. Sadly it's not the light-hearted and witty travelogue that I had expected. What it is is a hateful and relentlessly negative outburst read in an overly dramatic style. It lacks humour and is filled with the outrage of somebody who cannot fathom why he is given poor service by many that he meets, something that I was left in no doubt about. Bizarrely the author at one stage demands gratitude for winning WW2 and saving Europe from those that he meets when he himself was not born until 1951. This is an author that lives in UK yet often talks down that great nation. An author who's primary instinct is to make a beeline to the seedier side of town then talks the town down based on his first impression. An author who expresses his chagrin having not enjoying the gratification from such people he goes on to describe as whores. All this whilst his wife stayed home, pregnant with their child.
Listening to his often historically and geographically inaccurate rants with occasional sexism and racism mixed in for good measure led me to one inevitable conclusion, if you hate it so much why do it and having done it why write about it and inflict it upon us. A travel writer whose cultural mental block had him surprised when politely told about German social conduct laws.
Copenhagen seems to be the only city that he enjoyed, a point that could only derived from a lack of negativity. There really wasn't any great love expressed for it and he avoided the otherwise standard contempt and sarcasm vented about every other destination.
In contrast to this bilge, in my reviews on different subjects, I always attempt to find balance of opinion. This diatribe of rot however left me dumbstruck and honestly outraged at the author. Never before have I felt such annoyance at such an unnecessary book as this. I concluded that this is a traveller whose soup in every hotel in every city will have been topped up with nose drippings or worse. In my view a wholly justified change to the recipe in his case.

3 people found this helpful

Europe as it once was.

The Europe I knew and loved. Well written and read. A must read for today's traveller.
A mixture of humour and reality.

3 people found this helpful

Good listen

Narrator was Excellent. Story was not quite as good as the other book "a walk in the woods". Observations and insights not quite as funny as last book either.

7 people found this helpful

Fun to listen to..

A very lighthearted approach to Bill Bryson's travels around Europe. The author makes it a fun to listen to his travel memoir with his sophisticated sense of humor. A number of different countries across the Europe are covered with interesting anectodes and sharp critical observations at times. Narration is also very good and clear. Highly recommended.

6 people found this helpful