I’ve been trying to read some travel books to give me some inspiration for my own writing, but it’s very difficult to fit them in with all the other reading I need to do at the moment for work & study. At the moment I am reading Over the Moat, a love story set in Hue which is actually quite good, though I find the author (or is it the character of the author?) insufferable. I think this is an unavoidable aspect of travel writing. The person doing the telling is doomed to offend, irritate and embarrass. Paul Theroux gets around this by making himself such a thoroughly unattractive character that you almost can’t help but like him, and perhaps this is an excellent ruse.
I’ve just finished another book in which the author attempted to do this, but with less success. Duncan Fallowell’s Going as Far as I Can is an account of a journey to New Zealand – something sufficiently rare in travel writing to be noteworthy in itself. Fallowell is a good writer, there is no doubt, but I found myself irritated by his obsession with architecture, and some of his observations were really quite banal. That said, I couldn’t put the book down, and finished it very quickly – wondering at the end, though, why on earth I’d bothered. This is a constant bother with authors who are actually quite talented but whose ability to plot is flawed – you keep flicking from page to page but are left deeply unsatisfied at the end. Crime novels are particularly noteworthy for this, which is why I gave up reading them some years ago. 
