Don George - A Moveable Feast

Sometimes I get bored and search on the internet for books that may spark my interest even if it's from an author I've never read.  I like to read about other people's travels because I like to get inspired for my own plans to travel, something a lot of people apparently do in their 20s.  I have a number of guide books from Lonely Planet because I like their writers so when I found this collection, I bought it immediately even though I've only picked it up now as it intrigued me.

A Moveable Feast is an anthology edited by Don George who is a frequent editor for Lonely Planet, a travel guide publisher; Don George has edited a number of Lonely Planet's travel anthologies Better than Fiction - a collection of stories from novelists on their travels, By the Seat of My Pants - a collection of funny stories that have occurred while travelling, and The Kindness of Strangers - a collection of stories that explores unexpected human connections and kindness around the world.  A Moveable Feast is his collection of stories from writers that were deeply affected by some kind of food during their travels.

Rating: 7

Recommended To: Non-fiction fans; those that like to travel; foodies

Favourite Part: Mango Madness - Amanda Jones - Page 173-8

Good Points: Most of the stories were interesting; the variety of places; stories were relatively short

Bad Points: Some stories didn't fit; not a lot of female writers; all experienced writers

In A Moveable Feast, you travel all over the world through a large number of writers' eyes, each telling a different story, somehow related to food in various ways, whether it was something they tried or something they had during a trip, from bat to peanut butter.  Hitting nearly every continent, the food of each story affects each writer physically as well as emotionally and spiritually.

I found that, as I expected with an anthology, I enjoyed most of the stories and found them interesting as well as inspiring.  Because I went straight from school to university, and the small amount of money that I had at the time, I never had a gap year to go travelling in so it was, and still is, something that I want to, travel new places and experience something new, and from this book, I have gained some inspiration of where to go and what to do.  However, it may not too adventurous such as trekking up a mountain but I have now lived vicariously through someone else and that is enough to satisfy me for the foreseeable future.

Through the sheer variety of places that these writers wrote about, I feel like I have travelled the world in my imagination.  I was given an insight into places and cultures I would never think of visiting which is fascinating because I love to find out, even vicariously through books, about other cultures, even my own, as even other Western places as the States have a different culture to us Brits, even just slighting.  As well as myself, I think a lot of people like to find out about new places because it's human nature to want to explore, we've been doing it since we were able to crawl or even reach from the arms of those that held us as a baby, and this book will hopefully inspire you and teach you at least one thing through another person's experience.

In my opinion, some of the stories didn't mesh well with the rest, Matthew Fort's Dorego's - though as a side-note, I am not keen on Fort's writing, but it wasn't highly unexpected with there being so many different writers and places involved.  Those near the end were some of the better ones for me as I enjoyed them the most which was good because it ended on a high.  I did skip a couple of stories because I found them to be too dull which is the benefit of each story being its own separate piece.

I had two issues with the writers that were selected for A Moveable Feast; one is that there were more male writers when they could have made the anthology less skewed as there were only 12 out of 38 writers that were female.  The second issue was that every single writer was experience to some degree with published work; I would have found it interesting to hear from first time writers as well as experienced writers just to mix it up a bit and bring more variety.

Due to how this book was an anthology, I decided to pick my favourite story rather than part this time because it made more sense to me with each story being so different; I enjoyed many of them but I did eventually pick one.  Mango Madness was such a simple story, about the writer devouring a mango so enthusiastically before her companions return to camp, but it was by far my favourite travel story out of them all.  The descriptive language grabbed my attention and sparked my imagination as the mango was devoured which in turn made me crave some mango (and I still do) which is wonderful and frustration at two in the morning when you live in the middle of nowhere.  I loved Amanda Jones's writing style because it had the right combination of interaction between people and description that I like for non-fiction work and I am now considering reading more of her work.

Though there could have been a bit more variety in the writers, those with less experience as well as experienced writers, and more even gender-wise, I enjoyed most of this anthology because of the variety of places and experiences that these writers went through.  While I didn't enjoy a handful of them, most of the stories were entertaining and have inspired my own travel plans that I keep making up.