Flightless: Incredible Journeys Without Leaving the Ground

This is a better than average anthology / collection of short travel stories. Twenty six of them in here, all loosely themed around - well basically travelling but remaining “flightless”. EG all the travel is by ship, car, motorcycle, bicycle, foot, hitch hiking, train, camel, tuk tuk, vespa, pedal-boat (!), dhow and other methods... which presently escape my memory.

The stories vary, and cover numerous locations, which I have noted in my shelf selections, so look there, I am not re-typing them.

To arrive at a 4 star rating, I looked at the 26 stories, and considered than 6 or 7 were *** reads, there were another 9 or 10 which were **, a couple of ** stories, the remainder were ***. On balance 4 is right, as I mentioned above, this collection from Lonely Planet is slightly better than others I have read.

The few two star stories suffered from trying to fit too much in. They were typically very long journeys ‘around the world' over a number of years, and were reduced to paragraph summaries to join short fragments of narrative. They don't really work, and just feel rushed and lack detail.

Overall, a good book for 15 minute reads, which is how I used it.