The author takes one year off after a messy divorce and spends four months each in three countries: Italy, India, and Indonesia. In Italy, she focuses on pleasure (learning Italian and eating lots of yummy Italian food). In India, she devotes herself to the spiritual (spending time at an ashram and meditating). Lastly, she stays in Indonesia with the goal of finding balance between pleasure and the spiritual.I have mixed feelings about this book. I enjoyed the Italy section. Gilbert is a good writer and quite funny too. The India part was kinda weird...I've had some experience with meditation, silent retreats, and meditation, but there was some stuff in this section that was a little too off-the-wall for me and I skimmed portions of it. The Indonesia section recounts details of a love affair that well, I just didn't really need to know about. Overall, I appreciate Gilbert's writing and I enjoyed reading this book for the most part. I guess the thing that I'm still up in the air about is whether I like her as a person.
2 comments:
I have a friend who read this book and did not recommend it, because she decided she didn't like the author. My friend felt that the "lessons" learned were fairly basic and it felt pretty ridiculous to have to travel all over the world just to learn what the author learned. I can't say anything about that since I didn't read it, but her disgust made me hesitate about picking up the book.
I had the same delima with this book. I found it strange that the first part of the book is all about learning to be on her own and finding out who she is and in the end she ends up with someone anyway. I did love the first part about Italy though. It made me want to learn Italian and visit Rome. :)
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