Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe (1991)

Neither Here Nor There: Travels In Europe (1992) by Bill Bryson. This is one of Mr. Bryson’s earlier books. Herein he attempts to recapture some of the magic and delight he had 20 years before when he and his pal Steve Katz ventured around Europe just after high school, their hippie tour as it were. This time Bryson is alone, Katz is recalled in some reflections of times past, and Mr. Bryson’s family is back home in England abiding his whimsy.
Over a 4 month period he visits more than 20 different cities to various degrees of experience. He opens with a trip to the Arctic clime of Hammerfest in the far, far north of Norway in search of the Northern Lights add ends in Istanbul looking longingly across the Bosphorus toward the mystery that is Asia. Between he marvels at city parks and grand vistas of mountains or waterways, takes great pleasure in finding a good cafe with great beer or coffee, picks up a few great meals whereas the majority of his dining just provide sustenance, and meets with many, many, many bored autocrats whose main function is to impede his pleasure.
Be it Paris or Rome, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany or Yugoslavia, his humor shines through. There are many great insights into places to go and things to see and do, but I was left with the overall feeling that the trip wasn’t worth the hassle. It seems the greatest impediment to a tourist having a great time traveling, is, well, all the tourists traveling trying to have a good time. Every place worth seeing is sought out by thousands of sightseers from around the globe making the smaller cities and towns jam packed with humanity. The locals accept this crush as a necessary evil but by and large they don’t like it, thus making many a surly attitude toward the self-important foreigner part of the local decor.
And this was in 1992. Think how it is 30 years later. I love watching the Rick Steve’s tours of Europe, but I can’t but feel that unless you have a camera crew in tow, you won’t get treated as genially as he does
Although well written with the kind of humorous insight he is known for, this book left me feeling I would rather stay here than go there. ( )

This was the one Bill Bryson travelogue I've been most looking forward to hearing since I've never yet not loved every place I've been in Europe. So of course it stands to reason it's the one I enjoyed the least.

Let me start by saying that the narrator, William Roberts, does an excellent job. He adds life and personality to the narration so the you often forget he's reading a book.

Neither Here Nor There is obviously one of Bryson's earlier works, written when he was younger and apparently not at all concerned that he might give readers the impression that he aspired to becoming a modern day Benny Hill. It's definitely rawer in language and cruder in thought that any of his other work I've read to date. It didn't offend me, but I found it jarring after reading his later works where he's a kinder, more subtle, more thoughtful writer.

Overall, I enjoyed the listen, but as the places he loved are places already on my list and the places he did not love were places I've never been interested in (except Amsterdam - how do you not love Amsterdam?!?!), I didn't take anything away from this one beyond the knowledge that Bill Bryson's internal, younger self was a bit of a letch. ( )

Funny, funny book about his trip across Europe in the early 90's. My favorite line from the book is
"tourism is. You fly off to a strange land, eagerly abandoning all the comforts of home and then expend vast quantities of time and money in a largely futile effort to recapture the comforts you wouldn’t have lost if you hadn’t left home in the first place.”

What sums up a travel book better.

( )

So this should have been a DNF, but it was short enough that, well , I wasn’t concerned about sunk cost…
I’d read Walk in the Woods years ago and enjoyed it (but thinking more about that while I read this, I seemed to recall the first half of Woods being funny and the rest…meh)
I enjoyed reading about Bryson’s interactions with people - for the most part. But there were too many instances of him treating hotel and restaurant staff poorly- he came off as a rude jerk.
And his attempts at humor, for me, mostly fell flat.
And I’d been to a number of cities that he wrote about, but his writing came across as uninspired, as though he didn’t like to travel.
It was like he had a contract to churn out another book and he met his contractual obligation.

Want to read about interesting travel? Read Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North about his 922 A.D. journey to Rūs and witnessing a Viking funeral. ( )

Look, I enjoy Bill Bryson’s writing quite a lot. The first Bryson book I ever read was Notes from a Small Island (1995), an account of an American man’s travels around Great Britain. I remember finding it ripsnortingly funny at the time, and also on a subsequent re-read a few years later. I went on to enjoy quite a few of his other humorous travelogues over the years, as well as his memoir, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (2006).

So over the past few years I’ve found more enjoyment in his more straightforward histories, such as At Home: A Short History of Private Life and One Summer: America, 1927(2010 and 2013, respectively). But when I found Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe (1992) forgotten on my bookshelves, I decided to give it a try before donating it to the library book sale.

Neither Here nor There has some funny passages, to be sure. The book opens with Bryson’s nearly futile quest to see the Northern Lights in the far north of Norway without freezing to death in the process. But other sections are a little too freighted with an unattractive provincialism, as when he disparages a Swedish clerk in a train station for not speaking English, apparently forgetting that he is the one visiting her country who did not bother to learn even the most rudimentary Swedish phrases to ease his travels.

So, yeah. If you’ve enjoyed Bryson’s other travelogues and don’t find them to be distastefully xenophobic, I suspect you’ll enjoy this one as well. The themes here are well established in his other work; only the names and places have changed. ( )