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The Way of the World

Nicolas Bouvier

Recommended by 1 person on the record.

The bar next to each date shows how long ago it was said: 6d is days, 4yr is years.

Colin Thubron loved it
Bouvier never wrote another book comparable to this one. I loved it for its humanity, for its footloose feeling. He says somewhere, "You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you – or unmaking you." And you feel that he's a very vulnerable traveller. I love that sense of not having a planned journey – it might go anywhere. He travelled in this funny little car, a Fiat Topolino. I travelled in Russia in a Morris Marina, which people laughed at, and it secures your independence.

on fivebooks.com · 22 Jul 2018

This book on rcmnd →

That little bar

It says how long ago something was said, so you can tell last month from 2014 without doing the arithmetic. Full and green is recent; it drains and cools as the date gets older, and empties completely at about 6 years.

A striped bar means the date itself is an estimate — the source did not carry an exact one. An entry with no date at all gets no bar.