Reading Notes - What I read in the second half of September

I'm very behind on my reading lists - to beat last year's total of 70 books I have...a lot left to read.  Onward!

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 I've reread all of Bryson's travel books many a time, and this one is no exception.  It's classic Bryson.  He writes in a sort of 'vaguely belligerent guy' tone of voice a lot of the time, and he thinks nothing of colourful language, but he's very funny.  He's definitely an author who uses his publishing opportunities to air his opinions and his travelling as a way to outline every beer he drinks from one end of a hike to another, but again...he's funny.  You'll have to decide if the pro outweighs the cons for yourself on this one.

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 I have heard so much about Paul Theroux, and I love a good author recommendation, so last year I bought The Great Railway Bazaar and read it.  It was...okay.  I mean, I love well written travel literature and he had such a cult following I thought maybe I had puffed it up in my imagination and the reality would forever fall short.

No matter, I thought when I found this title on a used bookshelf a while ago, I'll give him another go!  Pretty much from the get go I could tell I was not going to love this book. His language was harsh and he made endless references to the opposite sex, but even if you could look past this - his trip seemed miserable, and he was miserable because of it.  It wasn't the kind of miserable that makes a great story, it was the kind of miserable where he discusses how much he can't stand his train companion, and he can't find a hotel room, and the food is awful, and then he meets up with his hated train companion and the poor fellow (clearly unaware he was going to be talked about in an upcoming book) offers Theroux an extra bed in his nice hotel room and Theroux takes him up on it and is miserable all through dinner and all through the night and all the rest of the time he interacts with this fellow until the time when he crosses into another in a string of countries he seems to hate equally.  Every city is a cesspool, every country riddled with corruption and social problems, every meal paltry, every village decrepit and poverty stricken.  He's too hot.  He's too cold.  There are dogs and he doesn't like dogs.  There's a screaming baby.  He can't write in his journal.  Some guy offers him a comic and he didn't like that comic because only stupid people read comics and whine whine whine.

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Auntie Mame!  Do you have books you remember from your younger years?  Not childhood books, necessarily, but books from your pre-teen or teen years when you were set free upon the bookshelves of your relatives?  Well, Auntie Mame is one of those for me.  I read it in one gluttonous day of lying in bed when very sick this past week and it is as ridiculous and outrageous as I remember it being when I first pulled it in a dusty 60s paperback from the shelves of the family lake house.  I imagine it must have belonged to my grandmother when she was a married woman - sort of the Candace Bushnell of books in the day, one might imagine.  Ah, Mame.