Great literary adventures!

What I liked most about this book: the very unique stories, of someone, often a journalist, tracing the an aspect of an author’s history: a town, a bridge, a lookout, a cafe… something contained in, or known to have provided the author’s inspiration. Even if I didn’t know the author, I still enjoyed every story.

What I liked least about this book: generic chapter titling and no accompanying list of the contents (not in the book’s description in Audible, and not in a downloadable PDF. The least they could have titled them (eg, Elena Ferrante’s Naples vs Chapter 23). There are 39 chapters in this book… if the NYT wants to inspire listeners to travel or read the books, how do they expect someone to do that? If an author is new to a listener, they aren’t likely to grasp the actually name and spelling hearing it at the start of a chapter. More than likely, any inspiration to seek out the book/author will come at the end of the chapter, but it’s not repeated there (just the writer who wrote the original piece in the NYT). It’s just not realistic to think the listener is going to stop, go back to the start of the chapter to listen again for the needed information… 39 times! It would have been so easy of them to do.

I’m the kind of listener who would turn this into a listening project, checking off which ones I’ve read, and looking (on Audible!) to add to my listening/reading list. And there are ones I’d want to listen to again, but impossible to find them without listening to the start of each chapter. What a huge disappointment (and it’s why I only gave it 4 stars).

The archives for the stories are on the NY Times website, so it’s entirely possible for someone to write this up. I’ve been tempted to do this myself, and add it to my review for others, but that’s not my job as a consumer of the media. And I’m still annoyed.

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