Or barnacles. Or maybe a Golden Retriever with barnacles. But for sweet knit-one-purl-one-Christ, leave this book on the shelf. I have, however, noticed a peculiar enthusiasm for Godliness in the land of the free. Mar 08, Maria rated it did not like it.
Don't bother with this book. It took me nearly a year to finish it. I was so disgusted by the writer's apparent lack of awareness of her own privilege, her trite observations, and the unbelievably shallow way in which she represents a journey initiated by grief, that I initially couldn't bear to read beyond Italy.
Like others who have written here, I made myself pick the book up again because so many people have raved about it, and I made myself finish it, hoping all the while there would be som Don't bother with this book. Like others who have written here, I made myself pick the book up again because so many people have raved about it, and I made myself finish it, hoping all the while there would be some redemptive insight or at least some small kernel of originality or wisdom.
I was sorely disappointed. Liz is so obsessed with male attention throughout the book in every section, she expounds in great detail on her flirtations with men, many of whom seem to "take care of her" or compliment her on her wit, beauty, or charm , that it makes her self-described quest to learn to be alone seem absurd and farcical.
She does not have a feminist bone in her body; shocking for a woman who is purportedly on a quest for self-discovery after what she describes as a "devastaing divorce. Basically, this memoir accounts her flirting her way across the globe into a new relationship, with little to no growth in self awareness that I can perceive. Even in India, her purported time of inward reflection, she attaches her herself to the likes of Richard from Texas, who seems a cross between a father figure and object of flirtation.
Ultimately, she falls in love with a man much older than she, who seems to dote on her in quite a paternalistic way. When she spends pages talking about her bladder infection from too much sex, I have to question what her intentions are in writing about this? Why do we need to know about her bladder infection? What does it add to our understanding of her quest? To me, it says only, "Look! I'm desirable! Additionally, her brand of spirituality certainly does not come close to transcending the fashionable Western obsession with all things Eastern, particularly Buddhism and the ashram culture.
That a Westerner could go to India on her spiritual quest and have absolutely no awareness of 1 her gross appropriation of another culture's religion, and 2 the abject poverty that surrounds her, is inexusable.
She oozes privilege at every turn, and that privilege remains unacknowledged and unexamined. I was willing to look past my initial reaction that the end of a relationship is not, in the grand scheme of things, "that bad;" everyone's suffering certainly has its own validity.
However, I was unable to muster much empathy for Elizabeth Gilbert despite my attempts to overcome my disgust at her shallow preoccupation. Ultimately, this woman had nothing to teach me other than that I should trust my own instincts to abandon a book when I have such a strong reaction of dislike from page one. I am sorry I spent the time and energy trying to finish it. I happened to read somewhere that she has recently bought a church in Manhattan which she is converting into her personal living space.
And this is enlightenment? I am sickened that Paramount has bought the rights to the book for a motion picture, and that she stands to make even more money than she already has on this insipid memoir. View all 60 comments. Aug 30, Cat rated it really liked it. I am embarrassed to read this book in public. The title and the flowery, pasta-y cover screams, "I'm a book that contains the relentless rants of a neurotic 34 year-old-woman.
But in the comfort of my own bed, I am totally falling for this memoir. Yes, Gilbert is emotionally self-indulgent are we supposed to feel bad that she lost both houses in the divorce? The endless, endless crying. Then again, this is a memoir and when the writing is just so clever, so hospitable, so damn funny, it's really hard to hold that against Gilbert in the end. The plot goes something like this: A year-old writer has everything she wants, including several successful books, a husband and two houses.
When she realizes she doesn't want to have kids and that she's not happy after all, she has a breakdown and leaves her husband. In the process, she realizes she has no identity. But instead, Gilbert decides to pack up and visit Italy, India and Indonesia, three places she hopes will ultimately bring her the inner balance she's been longing for. And on the surface, this book is a really entertaining travel essay.
Gilbert has this wonderfully quirky way of describing everything: A piece of pizza, a gelato. And the people. It's on her travels that I start to identify with Gilbert.
When I was 21, I spent four months traveling in Australia. Just like Gilbert during her first weeks in Italy, I was totally elated by my freedom. But about two weeks in, the loneliness came around and so did the anxiety. My typical day started with this inner monologue: "I have to get to the museum before noon, so I can fit in the sea kayaking trip at 2. How I envied the Eurotrash who could just sit by the hostel pool and read all day. But if I didn't do everything, then I would have failed at traveling.
In retrospect, Australia was a turning-point in my young life. I had no idea that this "go-go-go" attitude was how I had been living for years.
No wonder people thought I was uptight. Relaxing had never come easy to me, and it never will, but I'm getting a lot better at letting go and not worrying about seeing every last museum Gilbert ruminates on this topic quite a bit in her book.
Her first moment of true, unfettered happiness comes when she poaches some eggs and eats some asparagus on the floor of her apartment. So simple, but so fulfilling. In India, she writes that "life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death. She's not very good at it, and she wonders if all the energy she's spent chasing the next experience has kept her from enjoying anything. At this point in the book, I find myself wondering if Gilbert wants to be there at all. Perhaps going to an Ashram was the thing she thought she should do, not what she wanted to do.
I sure as hell wouldn't. What I really love about "Eat, Pray, Love" is that it's all about asking the simple question, "what do I want," a question that would have come in handy in Australia and numerous other times in my life.
It's so hard for some people, including me, and it really shouldn't be. I think that when you can honestly answer that question "No. I don't want to go to that discussion on post-modernism, even though I realize that I should be interested in it and it would make me a lot cooler in your eyes.
Really, I just want to watch back-to-back episodes of "Scrubs" you're well on your way to realizing your own identity and being ok with whoever that person is. View all 32 comments. Apr 30, Amy Kieffer rated it it was amazing. This was one of those books I will read over and over again.
All those cynics out there who criticize Gilbert for writing a "too cutesy" memoir that seems beyond belief and who claim that she is selfish for leaving her responsibility are clearly missing the point. First, she did not write the book to inspire you. She wrote it as her own memoir--you can agree or disagree with how she went about her "enlightenment," but you cannot judge her for how she found happiness.
It is her memoir, not yours. You can achieve enlightement by whatever means you want. Second, to call her irresponsible for leaving responsibilities behind is absurd.
She was in an unhappy marriage. You cannot force yourself to be happy. I applaud her for doing something that many people are afraid to do. She had no children and so the responsibilities she neglected were minimal. I also suspect that those of you who didn't enjoy the book could not relate to it. You have never suffered a life-changing tragedy. You have never felt paralyzed by fear, anger, or disappointment. You have never had to go through a healing process that seems endless.
You have never felt lost. That's great for you, but unfortunately that makes it hard for you to relate to this memoir. Finally, those of you who found her story too unbelievable have probably never felt the joy of traveling the world. There is no better way to discover yourself than getting out of your comfort zone and immersing yourself in someone else's. Traveling the world is not self-indulgent.
If doing what we want to or enjoy doing is self-indulgent, then we are all guilty. If you are enjoying an ice-cream sundae, meeting your friends for a night out, or a good work out, you are being self indulgent. My guess is that those of you who didn't find the value in this book are unhappy with your own life. Perhaps you should be a little more self-indulgent yourself. View all 34 comments. Nov 15, Simone Ramone rated it did not like it Shelves: book-club.
I found this book unbelievably phoney. I hated this so much that I got up early this morning to finish it and gave my copy to the library and honestly, I'm not too proud of that. To me it just felt so insincere that there's no chance I would have made it past the second chapter had it not been for book club obligations.
I enjoyed her writing style, but I absolutely could not warm to her at all. To be fair, I do think she would be an excellent travel writer. The section on India was agony to read. I I found this book unbelievably phoney. I have met enough people freshly returned from Indian ashrams to know that they often seem a tad self absorbed and I also suspect that they really only get up at 3am so that they have even more "me" time.
She didn't do much to alter my opinion. Honestly, this woman meditated longer, harder and bluer than anyone else has, past or present. She won the meditation competition that no-one was actually having. Possibly it was not enlightenment that she found, but simply that she finally became completely self absorbed.
Easy mistake to make. View all 27 comments. Oct 07, [Name Redacted] rated it did not like it Shelves: tripe , essays-and-autobiographies. Shallow, self-indulgent and mired in the sort of liberal American obsession with "oriental" exoticism that is uniquely offensive because it is treated as enobling by its purveyors.
She treats the rest of the world as though it exists for the consumption of jaded, rich, white Americans and this book is a monument to that sort of arrogance and ignorance. Sep 22, 0v0 rated it did not like it Recommends it for: white bourgeois american female malcontents.
What I'm about to say must be wrong, because I couldn't get through this book. I tried. And I failed. Don't read it. A cousin recommended EPL and I thought it would teach me something about the book market. My secret boyfriend at the public library was horrified I checked it out, given his ACLU-offensive intimacy with my record and tastes; and yes, like others, I was embarrassed to have EPL in my possession.
This hyper-feminized adventure travel? Subaltern poaching for the 21st century. Taker mentality as spiritual quest. These people need their own version of Outside magazine or some shit. Oh yeah, they already do. We're talking some serious dilettante tourism: taking entire countries as theme spas.
Italy for excess, India for asceticism, Indonesia for the middle path. Ladies: Country I is not your personal terrain for self-discovery. You don't get to interiorize Country I as a metaphor for your personal potential. If your interior journey needs a bunch of leisure time and poor countries to be realized, maybe you're asking the wrong questions. The consumerist mentality was so self-important and so priveleged that I just couldn't make myself give this book any more time.
View all 20 comments. Jan 31, Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it Shelves: biography , 21th-century , non-fiction , memoir , travel , united-states. The memoir chronicles the author's trip around the world after her divorce and what she discovered during her travels. At 32 years old, Elizabeth Gilbert was educated, had a home, a husband, and a successful career as a writer. She was, however, unhappy in her marriage and initiated a divorce. She then embarked on a rebound relationship that did not work out, leaving her devastated and alone.
After finalizing her difficult divorce, she spent the next year traveling the world. She spent four months in Italy, eating and enjoying life "Eat". She spent three months in India, finding her spirituality "Pray". She ended the year in Bali, Indonesia, looking for "balance" of the two and fell in love with a Brazilian businessman "Love". View 2 comments.
Jul 21, Tonya rated it it was ok. Ok, I admit I still have about 30 pages to go, which I will get around to reading soon need a break from the book though and which I highly doubt will prompt me to change my 2-star rating. I know many people love this book for what I consider personal reasons, therefore I tread lightly so as to not come off as critical of people's personal opinions, rather, just the book itself.
First, I found the author not-so-likable. I've read other readers' reviews in which she was described as 'so funny' Ok, I admit I still have about 30 pages to go, which I will get around to reading soon need a break from the book though and which I highly doubt will prompt me to change my 2-star rating. I've read other readers' reviews in which she was described as 'so funny' and like 'a girl we'd all love to know' and have to tell you, I didn't feel the love.
She came off to me as lofty, self-absorbed, and needy. I felt like she wanted to make herself a victim of her divorce and her depression. She was so vague about some aspects of the decline of her relationship with her ex-husband as well as with some details about the divorce, which led me to believe that she really did a number on him, but then she whined throughout the book about how HE was the one making the divorce so difficult. I don't mean to sound judgmental of how she coped with it, because I can't relate to that and it would be unfair of me, but I just couldn't help but feel that she kind of bashed the ex a little when she was seemingly the majority of the reason for their split.
Plus, she acted like she is the only person in the world to suffer through a divorce, yet she was "totally in love" with another man less than a month after she realized she wanted out of her marriage and her account isn't clear as to how long after her realization she actually got the divorce-ball rolling so I can't help but assume she was unfaithul.
So it was hard to have sympathy for her when she got hysterical over the ex disagreeing about settlement details. Um, I would think that happens when you blindside your spouse with a divorce request. Not saying it's right, just saying that's life. Secondly, in her search of spirituality, I couldn't help but find some of it a little far-fetched. And could she have drawn out her stay at the Ashram in India any longer or with more mind-numbing, snooooze-inducing detail??
I found myself skipping entire paragraphs at a time, and not just because I was in a bit of a hurry to read the book before book club My favorite part of India, ironically, was Richard From Texas. So I suppose that just sums up for us what I got out of the India section. But I won't leave us all on a totally negative note. I enjoyed parts of the book, some of them thoroughly. I loved her friends, for instance, and am perplexed at how I find the author so unlikable but somehow she has such cool people in her life?
When she wasn't being overly wordy, I loved reading her descriptions of Italy, India, and most especially Indonesia. And, of course, who didn't drool over her description of that pizza in Naples? View all 19 comments. Jun 29, Holly added it. I really didn't READ it all. I couldn't. I just couldn't get past how self centered and whiny this woman was. Then I quit reading it and now I feel much better.
View all 13 comments. Apr 17, Emma Giordano rated it liked it. Review to come. View all 3 comments. Feb 05, Denise rated it did not like it Recommends it for: anyone who wants my copy.
Shelves: travel , spirit , made-into-movie , read-and-swapped-books , italy , I just kept thinking wahhhhhh the whole time. Poor woman wants out of her marriage so she leaves Poor woman is depressed so she whines wahhhhh.
Life is so unfair for the poor woman wahhhh. Please, poor woman is completely lost so what does she do? I wish I could say that this was fiction but it isn't.
She's lost! Join the club but at least you have the money and the lack of responsibility to trav I just kept thinking wahhhhhh the whole time. Join the club but at least you have the money and the lack of responsibility to travel for an entire year and not have to worry about family, money and I don't know life in general.
She finds herself by traveling to three parts of the world - Italy to find her body, India to find her spirit and Indonesia to find a balance between the two. OK, that part I get but I just had a real difficult time finding sympathy for a woman who is able to do all of that and still find time to whine about how hard life is for her.
And guess what there's going to be a sequel - she remarrying so you know soon she will be divorcing and traveling to New Zealand, Prague and the South Pole to enlighten herself even more. Added to add - great now it's a movie. Soon they will make The Secret into a movie and we can all call it a day. I waited, and waited, in ever such impatient patience, until the duct-taped box from my daughter arrived.
It was one box among many, but this particular box, she had promised, would have within it her very best and most loved books, and among those -- Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love" that I had been longing to read. All of these boxes were arriving at my door because my daughter was taking wing on a journey like none before, and she is, for her 26 years, well traveled even when measured aga I waited, and waited, in ever such impatient patience, until the duct-taped box from my daughter arrived.
All of these boxes were arriving at my door because my daughter was taking wing on a journey like none before, and she is, for her 26 years, well traveled even when measured against adults thrice her age. It was a journey to complete her Master's degree, yes, but more than that.
It was a journey to fulfill a young woman's inherited from her mother wanderlust, as well as a study abroad, as well as a spiritual journey, as well a journey of healing after a painful breakup of a relationship back home. Indeed, how like Gilbert's story! Almost as if the two women, never having met, have moved on parallel lines.
Perhaps that is why Gilbert's story so appeals. If we haven't traveled it ourselves in our physical bodies, surely we have traveled it in our hearts and minds. Away from pain, towards enlightenment. Away from disappointments and varied betrayals, toward renewed, or even new, wholeness. Away from what was and full flung into what is and what will be.
While our individual journeys in life may vary in detail, and no doubt rather unimportant detail, Gilbert touches so very many of her readers because in her honest, open, sincere, and often deliciously hilarious and hilariously delicious account, she speaks for many, many, many of us. Even if some of us stay in place to find our healing and learn our life lessons, minds and hearts travel freely. We can find our spiritual awakenings in an Indian Ashram, as she does, or we can find it standing in our own shower on a Monday morning, facing another work week in our accustomed routines.
Gilbert's journey takes her first to Italy, where she heals her body, mostly through the pleasures of food; then to India, where for months she meditates and prays; finally to Bali, Indonesia, where she completes her healing and finds new love when she was sure she never again would. She takes us, her readers, along with a story that pulls us along jumping and skipping and running and gasping, not missing a moment, eating and praying and loving right along with her.
I enjoyed the sections my daughter had highlighted; they might have been mine. My girl is heading to Europe, and her journey will not be so different, in pursuit of learning, and understanding, and healing her own broken heart. I have no doubt that she will return changed forever, and in a most wondrous way.
Travel does that to us. The meeting with new cultures and peoples, challenging our own comfort zones, testing our own ideas of what life means and how we fit into it. I eagerly rush to read more of Gilbert's work.
She knows how to translate experience into wonderful words, and for one reason above all -- her courage to write honestly about an honest effort to live life well. Most highly and enthusiastically recommended. View 1 comment. May 28, Holly rated it did not like it. This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
I have copied this from a blog I wrote a few weeks ago: I've recently given in. I normally don't go for the Oprah-style self-help mumbo-jumbo.
However, the hype surrounding "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert was just too frenzied to ignore. So I gave in and read the book. She is sitting across from a real Italian S I have copied this from a blog I wrote a few weeks ago: I've recently given in.
She is sitting across from a real Italian Stallion at a table in a cafe in Rome, and contemplating sleeping with him. Then it occurs to her that at that point in her life her mids I might add , that it may not be wise to try to get over another man by getting involved with a new one. Is it just me, or am I the only one who thinks that one should already know that?
If this is supposed to be profound, she's really missing the mark. Before this journey Liz embarks on, she has just divorced her husband who basically took her for everything she had. She had been living with a man named David with whom she'd been having an extramarital affair and this relationship wasn't working either but she was still pining away for him.
Basically she's a serial monogamist with attachment disorder. The book opens with her as a high-achieving, wealthy "career girl" in her early 30s, living au grand luxe with her husband in the suburbs of New York. I had actively participated in every moment of the creation of this life — so why did I feel like none of it resembled me? Why is she so unhappy? She is not sure she loves her husband; she feels obliged to have a baby but doesn't really want one.
Her sister, a mother, has said to her in a textbook example of the comic-ambivalent mode : "Having a baby is like getting a tattoo on your face. You really need to be certain it's what you want before you commit.
Crying in the bathroom one night she finds herself praying. She has never been a religious person, she tells us, but her despair is such that she reaches out to this vaguely benign entity — God — and is surprised to discover she feels better. She unearths her own capacity for devotion, or at least finds in "God" an object that — unlike any of the real or possible objects in her actual life — will satisfy it.
Over the next few months she goes about extricating herself from what she doesn't "want" — at enormous financial and emotional cost — and formulates her elaborate international pan-cultural plan for self-discovery. What do Gilbert's large, mostly female readership recognise in this rather tortuous, idiosyncratic and frankly fantastical story? There are several possibilities. One is that they venerate her for reintroducing the idea of the pleasure principle into female experience.
She writes as a woman of 35, an age by which many of her readers will be married, to husbands they may experience — in her compelling description — as "my lighthouse and my albatross in equal measure"; will be wearing that facial tattoo, motherhood; will be shackled to houses of greater or lesser grandeur; will spend their free time with friends or in superstores — and will find their capacity for devotion exploited to the full by their sense of loyalty to these undertakings, their belief that they ought to honour their responsibilities and make the best of the life they've chosen for themselves, even if they sometimes feel that none of it resembles them.
Such a woman is never far from the necessity to cook or abstain from food, to perform an unselfish act, to exercise tolerance and self-sacrifice in relationships that define the core of our cultural conception of love.
And she may feel, in the performance of this role, the emotional extremity Gilbert attributes to herself. To have these ordinary aspects of her life repackaged as pleasurable gives her a kind of mental lift; and as Nigella Lawson has discovered, selling the pleasure concept to over-committed women is big business.
The problem lies in the egotism of these female goddesses and gurus, who require their female audience to stand still while they twirl about, who require us to watch and listen, to laugh at their jokes, to admire their beauty and their reality and their freedom, to witness their successes.
Elizabeth Gilbert is a relentless cataloguer of such successes, social, gastronomic, spiritual and sexual: the pizza she eats in Naples, the lover she takes in Bali, the friends she makes, even the quality of her transcendence at the ashram, all are perfect, the very best.
This voyage of self-discovery, it turns out, was a competition, at whose heart is a need to win. Gilbert refers once or twice in her book to a childhood in which she was driven to do well and achieve, and her failure to reconcile the forced fruits of female ambition with the realities of woman's destiny merely embroiders further the space between the two.
Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World by Rita Golden Gelman is another interesting travel memoir about a woman leaving her life behind to go travel the world.
At the age of 48, Gelman leaves her life behind in Los Angeles to become a nomad travelling the world. Her journey takes her across a number of continents including Africa, Asia and the Americas as she aims to dig deep into the culture and make local connections.
It also brilliantly showcases how she evolves both as a traveller and a person over the years. Becoming Odyssa: Adventures on the Appalachian Trail is the story of how after graduating college, Davis decides to hike the Appalachian Trail solo, going against the pleas of most of her family and friends. It follows her story as she undertakes the hike including going into great detail about all the physical and emotional challenges of undertaking such a gruelling hike.
Eat Pray Love is one of the most popular travel memoirs of recent times, however, there are a number of other great books like Eat Pray Love that will undoubtedly inspire you to hit the road soon! What are your favourite books like Eat Pray Love? Have we missed any on our list? Let us know in the comments below! Michael is the co-founder and writer of Books Like This One, a website helping you find more books to read!
He loves reading non-fiction, travel and business books. Table of Contents.
0コメント