Not So Much - THE ROAD TO OXIANA

The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron

My rating: 2 of 5 stars
The things we are forced to do for book club. This classic travel book is the diary-style memoir of an Englishman crossing Persia and Afghanistan in 1933. He is witty and likable, also random, pompous and casually racist in that impossibly pre-WWII way. His observations are keen and his writing witty - I even laughed out loud twice. But the world he captures is ancient history, and thus seems irrelevant. The buildings no longer stand, the countries have disappeared, the cities and ethnicities have changed names a hundred times. The writing is wonderfully descriptive, yet I never had the slightest idea what he was on about. The book reads as a diary - meant for himself - with casual half-references to characters and places never elaborated. I kept picking it up, but always felt a temper tantrum simmering just below the surface. Bored, anxious and with that bratty 'this had better be over soon' feeling, I would not recommend this book. Mark Twain is all the classic I could ever want.

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