I'm going to London in August (a girls' trip with mom; lots of pubs and food is expected), so I figured it would be fun to read a pile of books that are about or set in the city. Advance travelling so to speak. It's something that I've never done before, and should get me even more excited about the trip.

My first choice turned out to be not so great, though. Five Hundred Buildings of London is not bad by any means, but for me it was just very uninspiring. The cropping of some of the photos is not always so great, and colour photos would have made the architectural details pop out, but now the buildings look very muted and boring. The structure's a bit off as well: if I wanted to find out more about a building, I had to flip back and forth between that page and the index at the end. That said, there are some interesting and fun tidbits, and some buildings I really want to see some day (like the pink Gothic building!). Overall, though, I wouldn't go out of my way to try and find the book.