Book Review; There Are Other Rivers

The perils of shopping for books via Amazon are relatively few and easy to enumerate. First, unless you read the proffered sample, you don't get the same experience as you would in a bookstore. Second, it's far too easy to add books to a wish list without properly vetting them first. Third, which is really just an extension of the second, it's far to easy to just snap up cheap books.

I've fallen prey to all three perils, and Alistair Humphreys "There Are Other Rivers" is an example of the second one. This book loosely tells the story of the author's foot trek, following a river from the Indian Ocean up into the Himalaya mountains. It only tangentially deals with the people and experiences he has, however.

Book wishlists are, by definition, self selected. Look through my wishlist and you'll find a lot of survival fiction, woods lore, and travel journals of the epic adventure variety. When I put this book on my list, I thought that it was an example of the latter. It wasn't.

That's not to say that it wasn't a good read. I enjoyed reading the book, even though it was quite a bit shorter than I thought it would be. Rather, it was more like the "out of season bird alighting on my shoulder". An unexpected pleasure, momentarily pleasing, but not the sort of stuff that epics are woven from. Unless the bird talks, that is.

This book is more of a collection of diary entries than a travel journal. By which I mean that it doesn't have a real narrative, lumps of time are lost due to the nature of journal writing, and it focuses more on what the author thinks and feels rather than what he did. This isn't necessarily bad, but because of that second peril I had thought that I was getting into something else.

And, let me be frank, I'm not terribly interested in delving into another man's feelings without good reason. There were some high points and morals to derive, but mostly I found myself skipping ahead, which is never a good sign.

I'd give this book a 45 on my new corrected bell curve scale. It's within that time range of entertaining and enjoyable books that makes for good reading, but ultimately it was somewhat underwhelming.