Take You Cant Get There From Here: A Year On The Fringes Of A Shrinking World Scripted By Gayle Forman Expressed As E-Text

Forman invites us along a year long trek around the way with her husband, Nick, She visits people that are on the fringe fakaleiti in Tonga, Tolkienists in Kazakhstan, the Lemba people in Africa, etc and seeks out understanding their way of life in a way that is never condescending.


As she travels to new lands we are given brief history lessons, At first this felt too much like school but eventually I understood that in order to understand the people I had to learn about their past.


Eventually, the traveling puts a strain on her marriage and Forman doesn't shy away from sharing the ugly truth, I applaud her honesty when discussing her marriage because she's not afraid to point the finger at herself,

I found myself living vicariously through the writing, I envisioned myself alongside Forman and wondered if I could travel as she did,

This is a great book for any travel lover and anyone that loves our ever shrinking world, It's hard to set aside the critical when reading travel stories, but this one just kept me going, The author is a great writer YA and journalist and she's focused on the outcasts and "others" within cultures in countries off the beaten travel path around the worlda unique "third sex" in Tonga, street kids in Cambodian villages, 'Tolkienists' who find refuge in role playing societies in Kazakhstan, Hip Hop musicians in Zanzibar, prostitutes in Holland.
She travels most of the time with her husband, long time sweetheart and 'shy punk rock librarian', and shares some of the conflicts and pressures that constant travel companionship puts on a relationship.
She's also just insanely sociable, very different from her guy, and apparently very warm so that all kinds of people open up to her and invite her into their lives.
I liked the bits of political history but wasn't in love with how she framed globalization throughout b/c it pushed the critical button but I see that this gave context and breadth to the stories.
After all it was this 'shrinking world' due to globalization that was what she was setting out to discover on her yearlong journey.
That's the only reason I gave itstars/would be my real pick, Oh and b/c the cover is silly, but that's not her fault I'm sure, Here's a reflection I wrote on this book when I actually read it, during a freshman class on autobiographical writing:

I really enjoyed Gayle Formans book, You Cant Get There from Here.
A travel book, its theme is similar to Without Reservations, and yet Forman succeeds in ways that Steinbach does not, Why is this

I think there are several elements that grant Forman her success, and help to captivate us as readers.
For instance, she is not as introspective as Steinbach, While this is not necessarily a positive or a negative, I think it works well in Formans case, Steinbach left us feeling preached at, and a bit bored, Internal conflict, experienced while traveling the world, is not necessarily enough to keep an audience captivated for several hundred pages, To escape this problem, Forman is outwardly focused, addressing her personal problems briefly and with irregularity,

The exception to this is Formans focus on her marriage, and the trips affect on her and her husbands relationship, This is one portion of the book that I find incomplete, and redundant, She explains the stress, she shares her whining, she demonstrates her marriage undergoing strain, . . and then nothing. Were never really given a conclusion, We never see her move through the fighting into a new appreciation of her husband, or a new understanding of herself, Not really. There are small reconciliations, but nothing final, We are given conflict, but no resolution,

But for the most part, this does not happen, Forman organizes her book brilliantly, giving a theme to each chapter, dealing with that theme in full, and then moving on, Each chapter is both complete and unique, offering us something new no redundancy here and keeping us interested, She includes only the details that address the specific theme, letting nothing irrelevant slip in and distract, Her stories are fascinating and unusual, and yet very humanvery human, because they deal with people, There is conflict and resolution, epiphanies and flashbacks, but all of it is very structured, and very concrete, She deals with abstract concepts, but through physical interaction, not vague theorizing, Her themes hold her to the point, and give her stories consistency and relevance, As a transition tool, taking us from one story, and theme, to the next, she uses short chapters to skim the inbetween portions of the trip, freeing us from the mundane experience of daytoday life.


Even with these transition chapters, however, her book would still be disjointed if not for the overarching theme of globalization, This is what holds her book

together, and, ultimately, gives her wacky stories significance and structure, Globalization may seem like a heavy topic, and a bit of a stretch, for an autobiography, and yet Formans journalistic experience make this a logical choice.
Of course, this might alienate readers with no particular interest in the topic of globalization, but her stories are engaging nonetheless, and, in a globalizing world, the topic is extremely relevant.
I personally loved this aspect of her book, and found her insights to be meaningful and thought provoking,

One critique might be that, while globalization receives an adequate conclusion, her life does not, Perhaps this is an instance of her being too outwardly focused we want more insight into the trips effect on her personally, but we are not given it.
She returns home, but what did she learn, how did she change These events are now a part of who she is, but who is she Who is the new Gayle Forman, and how is she different than the woman who left home a year before We are never really told.
In these eight interconnected travel stories, journalist Gayle Forman traces the trajectory from her relatively comfortable life in New York's Hell's Kitchen to her sometimes extremeand extremely personalexperiences in some of the most exotic spots on earth

In this extraordinary memoirnow issued in paperbackGayle Forman takes us with her to the mountain hideaways of Kazakhstan's Tolkien fanatics and inside the townships of South Africa's lost tribe of Israel.
She introduces us to a wild assortment of characters: lovelorn Tongan transvestites, charismatic Tanzanian rap, precocious Cambodian street kids, outofwork Dutch prostitutes.
In the artful interplay of these eight lively, thoughtful stories, she reveals how all of these diverse livesas well as our ownare being inextricably altered by the evershrinking world that we share.
Because, she writes, "To forget the humanity in others is to risk forgetting one's own, " I enjoyed this bookI found it an easy and accessible read, and it did a fantastic job of stimulating my wanderlust without kicking it into overdrive.
Let me explain: Forman's travel experiences were honest and selfexamining, which made the book less about "ha ha, I get to go great places and you don't," and more about humans relating to each other from all corners of the map.
I'll be honest here. I hate it when books kick my wanderlust into overdrive, because I end up feeling agitated and worthless at the end, Like I'm missing out on something good in some other part of the world while I sit at my desk and send emails to pay my bills.
I really, really don't like feeling that way, I especially really, really don't like it when books make me feel that way, I like books that inspire me, not give me guilt trips about not taking enough trips,

There was nothing glorified about Forman's accounts of her travels, which kept it humble and, well, inspiring, I'd recommend this to anyone who's curious about other placesespecially the quirkiness of other places and the daily, unglamorous lives of those who call those places home.


Queers beware: The opening chapter talks about gender/sexual deviants in Tonga, Forman uses her Western eyes to try to make sense of it in a way that I found, as a very selfaware queer woman, slightly narrow.
But that's just me. This is a memoir of Gayle Forman's trip around the world with her husband, She's a journalist, so has a few stories in mind when she embarks on the tour, She learns about the Fakaleiti in Tonga, a group of men who dress like women and sleep with men but do not consider themselves gay.
It's a challenge to wrap your head around their completely different world view, She also meets up with a Chinese doctor enamored with the English language, works on a Bollywood movie set, plays games with a group of "Tolkienists" who have taken cos play to another level in Kazakhstan, learns about the Lemba one of the lost Jewish tribes traditions in South Africa, and interviews sex workers in the Netherlands.
I found the book to be somewhat disjointed, but the different experiences were definitely interesting, I think the fact that it took me two months to read it speaks volumes about how much I enjoyed the book, Great read. Learned a little something and now I look forward to reading some of Gayle Forman's other works, The first few chapters are the best, but I really enjoyed the whole thing, It's written by a journalist whose husband convinces her to take a year off with him and travel around the world, Along the way, the author looks for interesting subcultures to explore and write about, The first chapter, about the fakaleiti of Tonga, is not to be missed, The fakaleiti are born male, but make the decision to dress as women when they reach maturity, and for generations have been considered a third gender in Tonga, complete with cultural rules governing their interactions with men and women.
This first essay was definitely the most fascinating to me, but the rest of the essays were also interesting, funny, and good food for thought.


Some reviewers were bugged by the author's ongoing commentary about the marital difficulties that were brought about by this trip, The relationship turned out fine in the end, but the trip put a lot of strain on it in unforeseen ways, While that line of commentary did sometimes seem unnecessary and out of line with the larger scope of the book, I wasn't especially bothered by it.
I started reading the book while on the first major trip I'd ever taken with Hatton our honeymoon to Guam, and during thehours of travel to get to our destination, I learned that traveling can present relationship stresses that never show up in daytoday life.
Not to worry, we quickly got over it and the rest of the trip was fine, So I guess I could relate, Gayle Forman and her husband take a year off to travel around the world, visiting some offthebeaten track places, Throughout the year, Gayle interacts with locals and seeks them out actively, in a way that most tourists don't, Under the strain of travelling, her and her husband's relationship begins to suffer,

It's a very wellresearched book and enjoyable to read, Ms Forman introduces us to aspects of tourism not many of us would undertake, mainly because most of us don't have months to spend at a single location.


There are parts of the book that are fascinating, but throughout somethings felt forced and unnatural, At times, Gayle tries too hard and reminds us once and again that she was an outcast in her school who wasn't and lived much of her life on the fringes.
She's almost too cool. But the stories are wellwritten and will pull you in, just to find out what happens, A.rating overall.

I picked up this book because I am now hooked on Gayle Forman books after reading If I Stay and Where She Went, and because I love a good travel book.


The book started out slow, but picked up, I felt that I was on the trip with Forman and found myself getting annoyed with her neediness and constant complaining through a few of the chapters.
It was like being on a trip with someone that is driving you insane, Forman would make for an awful travel buddy, but her writing is captivating and you could really see the growth that the trip brought to her.
By the end of the book I was really glad that I picked it up,

The book is a nice, fun read and if you like her other books, you can see where she drew a bit of her inspiration from the experiences she has on her journey.
Wow, there were a ton of negative reviews about this book, . . but I felt Forman just came across as honest about herself and her relationships, I really enjoyed reading about places I had never heard of, read for theGood Reads Read Harder Challenge Read a Travel Memoir,