Bill Bryson · 1991 · road

Bill Bryson's second travel book, retracing at thirty-eight the backpacking trip he made across Europe as a student twenty years earlier. He starts in January at Hammerfest, the northernmost town on the continent, waiting for the Northern Lights, and finishes on the Bosphorus looking across at Asia and deciding to go home.

1. 1
   Hammerfest

   January, the northernmost town in Europe, and a thirty-hour bus ride from Oslo to sit in the dark waiting for the Northern Lights - which is how the book opens, with a man who has accelerated a summer trip by five months on a whim.

2. 2
   Oslo

   Where he washes his clothes in a hostel with a bottle he takes for detergent and is in fact toilet-bowl cleaner - and walks around the city afterwards being remarked upon by passers-by, which is the register of the whole book.

3. 3
   Paris

   South to France and the homicidal motorists, retracing the trip he made as a student twenty years earlier with Stephen Katz - the friend who will reappear as the companion in A Walk in the Woods.

4. 4
   Brussels

   The best thing that can be said for Brussels, he decides, is that it is only three hours from Paris - and then Bruges, Antwerp, Spa and Durbuy, which he likes considerably more and says so.

5. 5
   Cologne

   Aachen and Cologne, and a German restaurant where he tries hard not to order tripe and eyeballs - the running theme of a man travelling a continent whose languages he has spent twenty years not learning.

6. 6
   Amsterdam

   The Netherlands, and one of the stretches where the affection shows through the complaining - Bryson being at his best when he stops performing exasperation and just describes a place he likes.

7. 7
   Hamburg

   Window-shopping the sex shops of the Reeperbahn, and then Copenhagen, where he disputes his hotel bill at length - two of the set pieces people quote when they recommend the book.

8. 8
   Stockholm

   Up through Copenhagen and Gothenburg to Sweden, the top of the northern loop - and then the book jumps a thousand miles south without ceremony, which is exactly how the trip was made.

9. 9
   Rome

   Italy, and the second half of the journey: Rome, then Naples, Sorrento and Capri, then Florence, where he is robbed by pickpockets and takes it about as well as you would expect.

10. 10
    Milan

    Milan and Como, then Switzerland - the richest country on the continent, which he contrasts pointedly with the ones he is about to reach - and a day trip to Liechtenstein because it is there.

11. 11
    Vienna

    Austria, and then east into Yugoslavia in its last year of existing - a country the book describes in the present tense that stopped being one within months of publication.

12. 12
    Sofia

    Bulgaria, poor and grey and only just out from under the Soviet system - and the passage where the comic register drops away because there is nothing much to be funny about.

13. 13
    Istanbul

    The end: a city he finds chaotic and exhausting, and standing on the Bosphorus looking across at Asia, weary and homesick, wondering whether to keep going - and deciding to go home instead.