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Originally Posted by Renate
You said "travel" and I just finished "A Traveler at Forty", Theodore Dreiser, 1913. I found it very entertaining until he started traveling solo in Italy where he got too much into churches for my taste.
For Michener of questionable quality, I'll always vote for "The Drifters", exactly because it is a bit dated. Still, I like books where the narrator is not the main character, like in "The Razor's Edge", Maugham or even "A Town Like Alice", Nevil Shute. I like Shute, don't get me going.
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Thank you for the Dreiser recommendation; I wasn't aware of it and it sounds just my thing. Already downloaded. As an aside, I was a huge Dreiser fan as an adolescent and read all his novels, which strikes me today as a very dreary undertaking. Kids are weird.
I liked Shute when I was younger and I'm all about accepting books as reflecting the standards of their times, but the racism is wince-making now. Joe's nickname for Jean in
A Town Like Alice is painful. And I have to take issue with the narration in that, something which escaped me when I first read it but destroys it for me now: Noel knew things he couldn't possibly have known! Surely Jean wasn't sharing her intimate moments with Joe with him. A colossal technical failure in storytelling.
As for Michener, I have to confess with embarrassment that I have never read anything by him.