Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 Subject: Bill Bryson, Neither here Nor there Hi! This review will be in English, both since I read it in English and also because there will be one question about it on the written exam I'm having in Saturday. Bill Bryson is an American, born in 51, who had lived for some ten years in the UK. He wrote this book, Neither here Nor there, in 1990. It's about travelling in Europe. Contents: 1 To the North 2 Hammerfest 3 Oslo 4 Paris 5 Brussells 6 Belgium 7 Aachen and Cologne 8 Amsterdam 9 Hamburg 10 Copenhagen 11 Gothenburg 12 Stockholm 13 Rome 14 Naples, Sorrento and Capri 15 Florence 16 Milan and Como 17 Switzerland 18 Liechtenstein 19 Austria 20 Yugoslavia 21 Sofia 22 Istanbul It's quite funny, albeit he exaggerates a lot and sometimes is too stereotypical in his descriptions. But he seem to know quite much about the cities and countries beforehand; done his homework well. It's a mix of chronlogical telling, and quite many flasbacks of a similar travel he'd done 20 years ago. He has a great vocabulary, there were many words I didn't understood directly but had to guess from the context. He also makes allusions to people and things I don't know about. I don't think it would be as good reading this in translation. If I knew about it or got this book recommended I might have read it even without having to in order to get some more points at HiK. As you know I've only been to 3,10,11,12 more then briefly. An hour in Cologne, passing by Amsterdam on the highway, driving through Hamburg. But for future travels I've got some tips from this book, although it's more of a storybook on travels than a travellers guidebook. It is rather easy to read, my pace was about 35-40 pages an hour. I started reading it in september, but only for about one hour a week since I had other more complicated stuff, about the body, to learn during most of the reading time. And I knew this one didn't have to be finished until this week. It has 304 pages, so in effective time it's possible to read it in 8-10 hours. But why hurry?