Wonderful introspective and honest (or so it felt) book about travelling long distances on sleeper trains across US. It is about other people's stories. Mostly the stories of people Jenny meets in the smoking section of the train. She describes these smoking sections so clearly I could smell the stale tobacco. The people are clearly depicted and draw with sympathy; except the man who insulted all disabled people. Fantastic read. ( )

I was a little reluctant to order and read this book, fearing that it might be less of a travel and train account, and instead be just a touch “Chick-lit”. On reflection it so proves, or at least the book shows that the author has attitudes and feelings towards the people she met, travelled and stayed with – most of whom I think the rest of us would have carefully avoided – that reflect to her credit as a member of the more caring and nurturing gender.

There is perhaps, as another reviewer notes, rather too much on the author’s many periods in mental-care hospitals, and the recounting of these multiple stays seemed almost nostalgic as though they proved strangely more enjoyable, or at least more comfortable for her, than the train journeys in this book.

Given the state of Amtrak these days this may well be true of course.

As a former smoker (or ‘gasper’) I can empathize with the author’s difficulties with finding somewhere in America where she could still smoke, and I recognize the importance that smoking has in giving pleasure and comfort. It is those malodorous smoking cages that the author meets the people she writes about as they puff and chat she notes the details of their lives and offers us each of those ‘stories’.

Not the book I wanted, but overall an interesting perspective on America and travel.

As a rule I love reading books about train journeys. I have even managed to put up with Paul Theroux's ceaseless and venomous moaning (about anything … in fact, about everything) in his accounts of the various railway odysseys that he has undertaken. Friends even joke about whether my books about train journeys have dust anoraks instead of jackets.

I was, therefore, very pleased to find a copy of Jenny Diski's account of a journey by train around the edge of America, and even deferred starting it a couple of times so as to heighten the gratification. That may have proved a mistake.

Certainly her accounts of the actual journey were certainly interesting and enjoyable enough, but they were interspersed with a chaotic selection of memoirs of earlier stages of her life when she had been experiencing differing degrees of mental fragility. While many of these episodes were fascinating in themselves, I found the overall melange a little too overpowering, and the increasing frequency with which she took us back to yet another account of her grapple against neurosis came close to triggering some episodes of my own.

I was intrigued, however, by her account of the difficulties placed upon any rail traveller who smokes. My own smoking career is conspicuous by its sheer minimality: a few crafty gaspers when I was fourteen (that led to prodigious hacking, wheezing and shifting of phlegm, two or three drags on soggy joints as an undergraduate, and the occasional very noxious cigar at formal dinners nearly thirty years ago. I am, therefore, ill-equipped to understand the torment that Diski must have experienced while travelling on Amtrak as she seems to have been a smoker on an almost industrial scale. She writes with feeling about the stress of not being able to smoke, though I would have been interested to learn what she felt when she did smoke after an enforced break.

I think that the book might have been stronger if it had been about a hundred pages shorter, and with rather less of the psychiatric memoir, though I recognise that that might just be a reflection of my own mental fragility expressed as squeamishness. ( )

How wonderful is this book? Diski's travel across the USA and her experiences with being a smoker were just perfect - and made even more fun to read since I read it on a train myself. Highly recommended! ( )

Author Jenny Diski, for reasons best known to herself, decides to tour the circumference of America (or more or less; there’s a big gap in the west coast) by train. But this isn’t a travel book; it’s mainly an account of the people she meets on these trains – mostly in the smoking carriages, and they’re mostly people the rest of us would go out of our way to avoid – partly a reflection on the train service itself, where delays of up to half a day are not only not impossible but are almost expected, and, here and there, an introspective account of her early, troubled and abuse-ridden years. I would actually have preferred a travel book. My mistake. ( )