If you know me, you know that if there's anything I love more than reading, it's traveling, and if there's anything I love more than traveling, it's reading. (A cruel and unusual punishment for me, would be having to choose between the two on a permanent basis. But I digress.) Reading about travel, then, is as good as it gets - usually.
Sadly, that was not the case this time. I was not a fan of Thomas Swick's The Joys of Travel. In fact, I did not finish it. See, Swick's Joys felt more like a laundry list of places he'd been and random experiences he'd had than real, in-depth travel writing. He was a travel editor. I get it. Other people paid for his travel. Nice. He traveled hither and yon. Uh-huh. Also, he likes to read about the places he is traveling, particularly before he travels there. Fine. But at the end of the day, there has to be more than that. I neither laughed (Bill Bryson, Mark Adams), nor learned (David Quammen, Kennedy Warne). Rather, Swick's book has a haphazard quality to it, a first-I-went-here, then-I-went-there that left me scratching my head and wondering if a collection of Swick's articles, columns, and reviews mightn't have been more interesting.
I grant it is possible I'm selling Swick short. According to the Amazon page for this book, The New York Times, says Swick is "a perceptive, old-school travel writer whose prose brings celebrated and obscure destinations to life." Maybe. But I didn't get the feel from the first half of the book and if I'm going to read about obscure destinations (Zimbabwe, say, or even the Caucasus), I'd rather do so from true insiders than from someone who - like me - flies in and then out again, no matter how much pre-departure reading they've done.
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