Customer Reviews

Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America with Interruptions

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I enjoyed Diski's self revelations and conversations with Americans on her cross country train trips. Yes, she clearly needs her cigarettes, and yes, she discusses what are clearly uncomfortable settings of her own mental health, but people, her writing is fantastic, and she creates a definite view of what train travel in the US is like these days. The reviewer that wonders what happened in certain legs of the journey needs to realize that yes, one does sleep on the train and certain geography is doomed to be missed in such a trip. THis book is less about the external geography and more about the internal geography the authors sees with her traveling compatriots across America. A wonderful look at Americans and at an author examining herself while traveling.

This is a wonderful author. Her books are entertaining, valuable and insightful. Highly recommended.

This book in particular gives one the pleasure of a train trip without suffering through Amtrak delays. A must-read to train travel fanciers.

A militant solitaire with a quirky passion for traveling in circles (literally) being "entertained" by strangers as if they were coin-operated. Some great quotes in this book about Alone Time. Ended without an end, however...like a train just seemed to run out of steam.

Jenny Diski clearly had a great trip and this book proves how even a 'non-traveler' can easily fall beneath the spell of long-distance train travel. Anyone planning to follow her example and journey around North America by train should also get hold of the excellent USA by Rail guidebook by John Pitt.

This is the first book I've read by Jenni Diski, and I'm told it's not typical of her work. Certainly this was disappointing. It's not a conventional travelogue; in fact after 70 pages (25% of the book) she still hadn't got on the train!

Throughout she shows a brief insight into the personality of a dozen fellow passengers, but spends more time describing her problems gasping for a cigarette - hasn't she heard of nicotine patches?

In 8 lines (lines, not pages) she dismisses the whole journey from Portland Oregon to Sacramento to Denver to Albuquerque - and she doesn't even mention Nevada & Utah. Was she asleep the whole time? Then Arizona to New York via New Orleans vanishes in a dozen pages with 2 anecdotes. Was she bored? I'm surprised this won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award?

I love travelling around America, but anyone could make it more exciting than this.

Subtitle to this book is "daydreaming and smoking around America with interruptions." The author travels by freighter from England to the U.S., then around the edges of the U.S. by train. She talks to people and records their conversations, most of which take place in the trains' smoking sections. None of them are particularly interesting. I read the whole book, but found it narcisistic (she admits she's a narcisist) full of tales about her days in English mental institutions, and not that entertaining. PLUS: get her an editor - please. It's Willie Mays, not Willie May. It's St.Paul-Minneapolis, not St. Paul's-Minneapolis. And the Mississippi river is certainly not in North Dakota. Then there are the English usages. What are pilchards? What is a tannoy? One person she meets says what he'd like to do with his life is "mess about on boats." No American would say that. If you want to read a good travel book, stick to Paul Theroux. If you want an interesting memoir look elsewhere.