Todd Tyrtle

Good read, my favourite book on cycling since Byrne's Bicycle Diaries. I particularly liked how he was able to address the driver/cyclist conflict in an evenhanded and positive way.

I can't spend months or years living in India at this time but this was the next best thing. A little navel-gazy at times and the author has a bad habit of assuming what others must be thinking and presenting it as fact rather than being objective. Still, I quite enjoyed it.

Well written and compelling story. Though it was written in 1949, there is little to give that fact away.

This is the third time I've tried to read this. I'm embarrassed to admit that I stopped the first couple of times in part out of jealousy. I am also studying Hindi but I wasn't making such good progress. To be fair it had a lot to do with how little I was studying. This time, though, I have been paying better attention and feeling better about my own skills and so what I found was that reading the book didn't make me feel simultaneously jealous and down on myself for not trying very hard. Instead I really enjoyed it. It felt very familiar and reminded me of my own trips to Rajasthan and all of the help I've been getting from native Hindi speakers. Hearing about her own struggles and triumphs as someone learning language later in life felt very familiar. I know exactly what she was feeling when she would describe problems she had or things she was proud of. Her talk about language learning and motivation was also really fascinating. I liked how we went back and forth between her experiences and some of the more technical details.

Like any good travel memoir it makes me feel like I do at the end of a trip to a beloved place - sad to see it come to an end.

A quick but really enjoyable read. I am always a little reluctant to read books about a cycle race, worried that there will be more focus on physical details: speed, kilometres, difficulty, and not so much on the actual story. However, there was a nice balance between that (which is great in the level that was in this book) and other details about the other, what was on her mind, her history, and so on.

An epic read. So inspiring. Beautifully written and exciting. I could barely put it down. Now I'm sad that it's over - it's going to be a tough one to follow for sure!

This was a tricky read for me. Sometimes it was so negative I couldn't stand it. Other times he made Kolkata sound amazing and fascinating. As someone who has never been there and knows far too little history and culture of the area, I can't begin to comment in a decent review - so think of this less about the book and more about me. There were times I thought I would give up on it and other times I really enjoyed it.

It made me also question “what is travel writing for?” Should it always be positive? Should it always be from the perspective of one in the know? Should it be all-knowing and say “This is what Kolkata is” or acknowledge they're seeing a tiny fraction of what is there - but that fraction could be one of many contradictory realities of the place. I don't think any of us could hope to present a perfect picture of any place no matter how much we know so then how do we present our own perspective?

What I did take away from this, though, is how little history I do know. A tiny fraction of partition, NOTHING about the famine of 1943, nothing of the Naxalites there in the 70's. So I guess I'm glad I read it even I didn't always enjoy it. It opened my eyes to a whole bunch of things I didn't know about before and that will likely result in my going down a whole bunch of other interesting rabbit holes.

I've been lucky enough to take several of Arvinda's cooking classes. The thing I like about them is that the dishes made in the class, while quite simple to prepare, taste amazing - like you spent hours slaving in the kitchen over them. The recipes in this book are just like that. Tasty enough for a dinner party but easy enough to cook for dinner after a day at work.

Loved the essays in the beginning but the tour diary was barely readable. In the end he comes across as a spoiled jerk. But now I do know what venues, hotels, cities, and types of people he hates so I guess I did learn something...

Very trippy book. Had to finish it in a single sitting and left me in something of an altered state for a few hours afterwards. Highly recommended

It was an odd experience to find the book simultaneously so inspiring and yet find the author so irritating. Fiercely competitive in the way that turned me off anything athletic for 90% of my life, sexist (eff anyone using the word “Chicked” to describe the humiliation (eyeroll) of being passed by gasp a woman), and not without at least one racial slur.

Still, for some reason I persisted, and I did really resonate with the idea of “doing what needs to be done” and pushing through challenges instead of giving up.

Would I recommend it to others? Probably not. I bet there are way more inspiring books out there by people that wouldn't bug me as much. Still, I suppose that having found this on the side of the road in a free box it was worth every penny.

The perfect book at the perfect time. What a great book to read at the end of 2020 with so much hope and relevance. As you can see, I devoured it - I just started it yesterday.

It may not be the most helpful review or make sense to anyone but me, but this book feels like my favourite kind of book. Dreamlike and not always making sense. The Coma by Alex Garland, More than This by Patrick Ness both fall in to this category hugely. And from a totally different genre: Tony Soprano's dreams. In all of these cases I devour the content non-stop. Now I need to find the next one.

Bought this one many years ago and used it a couple times with pretty poor results. That said, in the intervening years I have grown a lot as a cook, so it might be worth giving this another shot.

Scary - he writes about the George W. Bush presidency decades before it occurred. Fortunately W's rule ended differently than this book did...

Beautifully written and really captures the feeling of living within a dysfunctional family - albeit in the author's case, an extreme example. The feeling of choosing between having a family and having sanity is illustrated well.

Wow - I only just thought of this book today because I just saw someone mention Where the Crawdads Sing and saw her name. I remember really enjoying this book at the time. Not sure what I'd think of it today.

This must be the fourth or fifth time I've re-read it and it seems even more timely. Not just related to the current situation with Coronavirus but the polarization of humans to charismatic leaders, each promoting fear of the others. We may not all be having dreams about our leaders that make us feel an affinity for one or the other, but we're still taking in information - a shared subconscious, if you will, made up not of dreams but of social media posts.

When it comes to movies, there's a certain kind of movie that my partner and I say is really great on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Usually not an Oscar winner, often not even widely known but one that brings a smile to your face and makes you glad you spent the time to relax and enjoy it.

This book is the literary equivalent. “Comfortable” to read and brought a smile to my face.

Pretty disappointing, all in all. I didn't really connect with any of the characters and wasn't particularly interested in the plot either. So without emotional investment or quite frankly any emotional stakes at all, it just read like it was created by a computer program designed to drop the appropriate tech company names and archetypes in the right places.

I really WANTED to like the book, it just didn't deliver what I had hoped for.

Good but not as good as I'd hoped. I was left feeling like I'd eaten an otherwise well-seasoned dish that lacked salt. There were interesting ideas and experiences but nothing to really get me as hooked as I should be. I think in great part it was the lack of a sympathetic character. The main character had few details about her, and even lacked a name. It was a fascinating world and I'm curious about what happens next, but I'm not as blown away as I was by books from similarly mindbending worlds (like “More than This” by Patrick Ness, for example)

I'll give the Kindle sample for the next book a chance. Maybe he wrote a likeable and interesting character in to the next book.

Well written and compelling story. Though it was written in 1949, there is little to give that fact away.

Very enjoyable reading with tons of interesting facts and stories I never knew before. Beautiful artwork as well. You know it's interesting when you're left wanting to read more. Thankfully the author has a whole “recommended reading” section at the end to keep me satisfied for a long while to come.

Now to find a way to get back down to NYC for another trip soon...

It was OK, just OK. If there had been a character I liked I may have enjoyed it more. I've had a string of really good reads lately and this was a bit of a letdown. The world seemed a little patchy - like a Potemkin Village. We saw a bit of the world but the depth wasn't there, and being forced to travel it with people ranging from mildly irritating to downright odious wasn't enjoyable.

Well written, interesting and funny stories and the beginning was a fun trip back to the past. On the other hand, after the first half I ended up with snark-fatigue and had to push myself to finish.

Brilliant, clever, and engaging. It makes me think about the stories embedded within my own “here.” I couldn't put it down and read it in a single sitting.