Driving Home: An American Journey

Well, how to describe 600 pages of unclassifyable personal memoirs, literary criticism (and visual art), sociological pieces and political statements, of historical chronicles and a bit of travel wrting thrown in? I can't, and maybe that is the problem I had with the collection itself. The writing, style, wittiness is pure Raban, as good as he comes (and that is good!), and many pieces are undeniably little gems (even though I can only comprehend his book rewievs after having read the book, and even then, often struggle) - even the political articles, now almost two terms behind, still ring true), but the combination and the sorting of the pieces resemble a thrift shop (Hey, let's put all the unsorted, unsortable writings together in a show more big'un to get some money out of them at all) , which doesn't normally do justice to little gems, does it? And since so much seems put in at random, there is a growing feeling of repetition as one guzzles up the pages. (After having read his other books, I feel I'm sufficiently informed about the social/geographical divide in Washington State or the hopelessness of homesteads in semi-arid regions and how they got there at all.
I have now exhausted, it seems, non-fictional (or semi-fictional, for his travel ewritings) Raban, but am reluctant to turn to his novels. Will the inventor of stories be as good as the observer was? show less

Not all the essays are as compelling as some, but the writing is masterful.

Although I enjoyed this book, I was glad I got it from the library rather than buying it, because more of the book than I thought reasonable consisted of a mishmash of unrelated book reviews and essays. But when on topic, I enjoyed Jonathan Raban's ruminations on his adopted home of Seattle, and on the wider Pacific Northwest.

Paul wrote his Tao of Travel. This is Jonathan's.