Enjoyed the first third of the book - then lost interest. Looking back it might have been when she writes of her mother dying. Before that it touched my interest and afterwards my interest drifted off. May be me and not the book..... So less than 3 stars to be fair. ( )

Enjoyed the first third of the book - then lost interest. Looking back it might have been when she writes of her mother dying. Before that it touched my interest and afterwards my interest drifted off. May be me and not the book..... So less than 3 stars to be fair. ( )

I began by liking this story tremendously; Aubin's school years, reading and working hard though reluctantly, struck a chord, and her account of visiting the East when the East really was that is marvellous. But then she got rich... and the text becomes almost arrogant at times. Pity.

https://youtu.be/ZI7z2peQvdA ( )

This book caught me off-guard since I knew nothing about the author, but love travel books and travel by train in particular. It is part-memoir, part-reveries about train travel and the seemingly hundreds of places that Lisa has visited. She jumps around, from England to Venezuela to Italy to Scotland, throwing in Russia and Argentina and several other countries, but writes with passion and paranoia and profound insight into the psychology of people; she also knows her botany, rambling off garden plant names casually, which always impresses me. Reading this book made me visit Wikipedia to get a fuller understanding of her life, her many loves and homes, in a more comprehendible chronology. But someone who cherishes (and lugs around) favorite old suitcases, and who wears Edwardian dresses when she travels by train, is someone I would like to read more about. I highly recommend this book and her other memoirs. ( )

As suggested by the full title, the book's a memoir with each chapter being an essay related in some way to an overall train theme. I read her more fleshed-out memoir "Memory Maps" first, so this one seemed sketchy to me. Unfortunately, this one re-enforced my previous impression of how self-consciously precocious she's always been. I give it a relatively high rating because she's a good writer, but I've decided that I'm really not interested in her life story, and how she's presented it. ( )