Ox Travels: Meetings with Remarkable Travel Writers

A collection of non-fiction short stories from travel writers, revolving around the theme of a meeting. They are generally around 10 pages long, some shorter, some longer.

The authors making up the collection are pretty big hitters - five or six of them are amongst my favourite authors, and another dozen I have read before and enjoyed.

A quick summary review would be - far more hits than misses, a wide variety of locations and situations, some very good stories, and only two that I DNF'd. This is pretty good for thirty six different authors.

I read this slowly, with a story here, and a couple of stories there, so it isn't easy to pick out favourites, but there are authors I find reliable who were strongest, and there are few surprises that Theroux, Dalrymple, Thubron, Dervla Murphy, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Peter Godwin and Tim Butcher were amongst the best. Better still, there were a few authors I didn't know which were also good stories, and will be worth seeking out again.

While these short encounter stories don't really let the reader make a connection with the story as much as a longer, more in-depth book does, I think you need to go into a book set up this way knowing that. perfectly suited to dipping into for 10-20 minutes at a time.

For me somewhere between 3 and 4 stars, but closer to 4.