Here’s a highly acclaimed piece of travel writing from Germany:

The weight

The story: WB is a journalist who has a thing for walking, so it seems rather natural that he would decide to venture into Eastern Europe on foot. He starts in Berlin and walks through Poland, Belarus and eventually to Moscow. Not 100% of this is done on foot though, as he apparently does some hitchhiking on the way.

The book is quite interesting. It is written in a style that feels at times like a journalistic essay and at other times like an ornate novel. WB knows how to write, and it hardly gets boring.

That being said, I found this book to be surprisingly heavy. It seemed like WB was constantly looking for the deep and the tragic, and sometimes (only sometimes) his writing even reminded me a bit of that of a certain Werner Herzog. Of course it was a lot better than that, but I still would have liked it to be a bit lighter.

Anyway, I thought it was a good book.

7/10