I wasn’t planning to review any of these books. I’ve read them all so many times, and they are all hopelessly outdated, especially Neither Here Nor There and The Lost Continent. These are books that I read and adored when I was younger, that helped me dream about a world outside of the small town I grew up in, and that even led to an aborted solo road trip when I was 21. Reading them after many years away brought back sweet memories, but there’s […]
A Graveyard Where Nothing Stays Buried
So, turns out some of those Civil War reenactors aren’t just pretending. I’ve never lived below the Mason-Dixon line, so this book is a bit of a shock. Confederates in the Attic is Tony Horwitz’s first-person account of his journey through the South, exploring Civil War battlefields, visiting memorials and museums, and taking part in reenactments with a “hard-core” group (hard-core here meaning they throw away the apple he wanted to eat because that particular kind didn’t exist in the 1860s, confiscate his sleeping roll, […]
The Wide Brown Land
“This is a country that is at once staggeringly empty and yet packed with stuff. Interesting stuff, ancient stuff, stuff not readily explained. Stuff yet to be found.” Every time I read this book it reawakens in me a longing to visit Australia. I want to see literally every place Bill Bryson visits. I can’t get enough information about the animals and plants (whenever I reread it, my Google search history is full of tingle trees, potoroos, cassowaries, and box jellyfish). What is it like to ride […]
Her best travelogue yet.
This light but still quietly devastating little travelogue might be the best thing Lucy Knisley has ever written. (Drawn? Created? Mixed media confuses word choice.) Her first two travelogues (French Milk and An Age of License) were explorations of her own maturation as she saw different parts of the world, but this one is on a whole other level. Her grandparents Allen and Phyllis are 93 and 90 years old respectively, and have signed up to go on a Caribbean cruise with a group from […]
Someone pay me to travel around Europe eating tasty food and kissing cute boys.
Lucy Knisley is a delightful, talented human being, and I will read every book she chooses to publish. This particular book is a record of her travels to Europe over the summer of 2011. She was invited to speak at a Norwegian comics convention in Bergen, and used the opportunity to travel to Sweden to visit a man she’d met several weeks before when he was vacationing in New York City. She also travels to France (Paris, and another city of which I’ve since forgotten […]
A travelogue to Paris in comic form.
I’ve been a fan of Lucy Knisley’s since probably around 2007, actually, which is when she published this travelogue of her time in Paris with her mother, when both of them were celebrating special birthdays. Lucy was turning twenty-two, just on the verge of graduating from college, and her mother was turning fifty. They spent five weeks living in a tiny Parisian apartment, going to see museums, and eating mounds and mounds of French food. Honestly, I don’t even remember where or how I found […]