Sun After Dark: Flights into the Foreign Iyer, Pico

As usual, Iyer takes me to places I would have never visited without him. This collection of essays takes the reader from California to Japan to Angor Wat to Bolivia-- I'm always surprised by the places Iyer has been to, and his easy way of sharing his thoughts about them. This is a great armchair traveler book. You might not have time/energery/money to visit all these places, but Iyer's descriptions are so vivid that he does all the work for you--you just have to go along for the ride.

Pico Iyer apparently has something of a cult following, and well, I guess his writing is an acquired taste. He's introspective, and on a first name basis with his old family friend, the Dalai Lama, and hangs out in the mountains above Los Angeles with Leonard Cohen and his Buddhist guru, but for all its potential, none of this was very interesting to me. Jet lag is a theme visited throughout the essays, and reading this book made me feel like I was suffering from it myself.You don't learn much about the places described (that is, when Iyer actually writes about a place), but you learn about what's going on inside Iyer's head, and frankly, I just didn't get it.

Pico is always good