Neither Accurate Nor Original

I just finished reading Bill Bryson's "Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe." I am a big fan of Bryson, especially "A Walk in the Woods" and "The Mother Tongue," but quite sadly I have to say I'm not a huge fan of this one. Sure, he gives some interesting descriptions of places in Europe I'll surely never go, but he's so blatantly stereotypical in his perceptions of people. He writes the French off completely as arrogant and self-centered, all based on Paris, which ticks me off immeasureably. I hate when people base their idea of the French on waiters in the Latin Quarter. Try going to a restaurant off Times Square and see if they're just fawning over obnoxious tourists there, too. Anyway, he does this with other nationalities, too, like calling the Austrians rednecks and assuming that all Swedes are blond, and that just gets old. As does his obsession with how expensive everything is. Okay, this is Europe in 1990, I believe, which was more expensive than the U.S. or probably England, where he was living when he wrote this, but he's constantly harping on how he's being ripped off for bad food. Hyperbole doesn't make for convincing travel writing. I also got very sick of his constant comments about how fat he'd gotten. Great. So stop smoking and drinking too much. I don't need to hear about it.

All that said, I still highly recommend "A Walk in the Woods" and "I'm a Stranger Here Myself" for extremely interesting observations about the U.S. And of course "The Mother Tongue" is a fascinating, hysterical look at English.