*****= An all-time favorite
**** = Outstanding
***
= Above average
**
= Enjoyable
*
= Good,
with reservations
****My Love Affair With England
A Traveler's Memoir
by Susan Allen Toth
Reviewed October 20, 2003.
Ballantine Books, New York, 1992. 320 pages. A Sonderbooks’ Stand-out of 2003:
#5, Cross-Cultural Nonfiction
I, too, have fallen in love with England. Though I’ve spent
only a week there, it captured my heart, and had captured it long before
I’d ever been there through the books I’d read. I’ve also spent three
magnificent weeks in Ireland and one in Scotland, and I find the same magic
in those places.
If you love to read and you’re an English speaker, then England has
a familiar feeling of somewhere you’ve long known, a feeling of home.
Susan Allen Toth captures some of the magic and delight of England
in her book. She doesn’t live in England, but has spent some long
months there and goes back again and again.
This book doesn’t go chronologically for the most part, but explores
interesting topics like haunted houses, English gardens, walking in England,
sheep-dog trials, and the very meaning of life. I read this one
slowly, dipping into it a little at a time, enjoying the spirit of England
that it evokes. I began it even before our trip to Scotland this
summer, feeling so lucky that I, too, could travel in Britain.
Even if you aren’t so lucky as to have been to England yourself,
you can visit England vicariously in this book, while thinking about
travel and life and life’s simple pleasures.
Book Reviews
by Sondra Eklund