FINALLY, I'm free of this book. It has been a LONG read, spread over many months, and for good reasons.

I'd like to start by saying that the author has a truly spectacular vocabulary, and a great way with words. His prose can be as pretty as it can be laugh-inducing. He could be one of the funniest men in the world... if he were not such a bigoted, sexist american. While we may find beautiful sentences such as "It was spring on the streets, but February on people's faces." in this book, we also can read the most obnoxious, perverted horrors I've seen in a long time. Like, when the author owns up wanting to bring a drunk, comatose girl to her hotel, hoping to "lay his tingling mitts on her splendid buttocks" while she's out of it. Is that sexual assault or rape? Because it cannot be anything else.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, but humor's a hard thing to master, and racism/sexism is NOT a prerequisite to be funny. On the contrary. Even if that book's old, it does not change anything. People were already fighting to justice and equality at the time, or even basic respect and decency for minorities, and Bill Bryson clearly wanted no part in that. 

All that the author was willing to do, through his travels and writing, was apparently to complain, criticize, and lament some more. Bigotry, misoginy, and racism were walking side-by-side with him. Gypsies, arabs, women, no one's safe from his wrath, in berween two sexually degrading comments, of course.

Another thing is, there's no dialog, at all. As the author's very busy walking around and spewing préjugés at everyone, he has no time to actually exchange with the population... which makes this book surprisingly long, as well as extremely offensive to every person who's not a white, straight, cis, rich man from the United States of America.

While I don't believe we should blame "the old age of that book" for its numerous, problematics remarks, I do think we ought to just categorize that as "another american's self-serving view of the world". I'm starting to think we just shoudn't leave americans write nonfiction, as they are themselves living in some sort of a simulation, therefore rendering them incapable of observing the reality around their blind asses. This way, we'll avoid trash books such as this one being recommended to me (I still do not get why everyone and their mothers were recommending that book to me. What the aactual fuck?).

To end this note on a happier note, somehow, this book made me want to travel even more than I already want on a regular basis (meaning, a lot). Be it to actually meet the people Bill Bryson had no desire to encounter, or to see the place he, honestly, wonderfully described (as I said, the author's vocabulary isn't the issue), I'm out of that book feeling relieved of having to read more of it, appaled at knowing that this is a successfull memoir, and determined to discover the world myself. While once again, being extremely furious at capitalism, which let thoughtless americans travel all they want only for them to spit on the populations they cross, while actual, curious people cannot because they're poor and burdened by unfairness. Life sucks.