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A review by pantsyreads
Morton: A Cross-Country Rail Journey by David Collier
2.0
As I've mentioned before, I'm a sucker for travelogues. Normally, I like to read them to discover places I've never been, or would like to go. [b:Morton|34227792|Morton A Cross-Country Rail Journey|David Collier|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1488471599s/34227792.jpg|55281543] on the other hand is all about my home country Canada. Collier's memoir details how he and his family travelled through much of Canada via train travel. I admittedly haven't travelled much in my home and native land (I live in Ontario and the only other provinces I've visited are Quebec and Alberta), so I was excited to dive in.
While Collier's memoir does involve a lot of travel, it didn't read much like a travelogue. Instead, what I got were the random and meandering musings of a middle-aged man who makes shallow statements that try to be deep.
Some of the anecdotes in here are fun - for example, Collier details how sleeper trains are designed (they look like bunk beds) - but then he would ruin it with his random judgements, like mentioning how some passengers are too obese for the top bunk of the sleep compartment. This led into a short musing on the obesity epidemic the world is in, and ughhh, I just don't care??? I really wish some of those asides had been left out.
I also wish we had gotten to know Collier's family a bit more. He's travelling with his wife and son, and while they do have dialogue, you never get to know them as people. There are some mentions of how Collier and his wife met, but not much else. I understand that the focus here was supposed to be travel, but even that all felt like an aside.
My expectations sadly made this book a miss for me. Where I was expecting an exciting travelogue of my home country, what I got instead was a narrative that had train travel, but was mainly about Collier's thoughts and feelings. Not terrible, but not what I had in mind when I picked this up.
While Collier's memoir does involve a lot of travel, it didn't read much like a travelogue. Instead, what I got were the random and meandering musings of a middle-aged man who makes shallow statements that try to be deep.
Some of the anecdotes in here are fun - for example, Collier details how sleeper trains are designed (they look like bunk beds) - but then he would ruin it with his random judgements, like mentioning how some passengers are too obese for the top bunk of the sleep compartment. This led into a short musing on the obesity epidemic the world is in, and ughhh, I just don't care??? I really wish some of those asides had been left out.
I also wish we had gotten to know Collier's family a bit more. He's travelling with his wife and son, and while they do have dialogue, you never get to know them as people. There are some mentions of how Collier and his wife met, but not much else. I understand that the focus here was supposed to be travel, but even that all felt like an aside.
My expectations sadly made this book a miss for me. Where I was expecting an exciting travelogue of my home country, what I got instead was a narrative that had train travel, but was mainly about Collier's thoughts and feelings. Not terrible, but not what I had in mind when I picked this up.