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Rhonda Strickland's avatar

Amazing sentence and your illuminating analysis is brilliant, as always. I'm wondering what you think of Bruce Chatwin and Pico Iyer, (both, among others, I enjoy for their writing and not so much their 'travel') and Paul Theroux, who I've never liked, I guess because I don't like his writing, period.

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Ben Dolnick's avatar

Hello! The little I've read of Iyer (too little to form an opinion really) has struck me a a bit watercolory in a way I don't love. And I don't think I've read more than a page or two of Chatwin. It's a real underexplored area on my literary map.

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Rhonda Strickland's avatar

I get what you mean by 'watercolory'! Great description of the one thing that bothered me about his writing, that I couldn't put my finger on. Thanks for your reply!

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Mary O’Reilly's avatar

"I don’t especially care about places; I care about people." Me too! When my husband and I visited Rome before we had kids, schlepping ourselves from ruin to ruin, I said, "I just wish someone would invite us up for lunch and tell me all about their life." I pictured an old woman wrapped in shawls, smelling faintly of oregano.

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Ben Dolnick's avatar

I couldn't relate to this more

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