I requested a review copy of A Stingray Bit My Nipple!: True Stories from Real Travelers, by Erik Torkells and the readers of Budget Travel, from LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program. (This review is, alas, not early; the book was published in April.)
This paperback consists of single-page anecdotes from readers, mostly of international travel, and often accompanied by their pictures. Because I find it very difficult to turn off my analytic tendencies, I found myself wanting to categorize the stories: weird food, mistranslations, sexual boundaries, toilets, animals . . . (I also found it difficult to avoid forming opinions about some of the people recounting these anecdotes, which is perhaps less than charitable of me, but probably more understandable than wanting to chart the distribution of story types. I will note on the evidence of the pictures, the readers of Budget Travel are quite overwhelmingly white.)
There are some good stories and pictures in here. I particularly like the pig drinking a beer and the camel drinking a Coke—they both look very happy about it. I envy the woman who bathed in a mineral spring pool with flames dancing on the surface. And I laughed at the hand-painted sign on St. John that reads, “Tourist Info: You Are Lost” (they were, too) and the guy who bought a T-shirt that accurately labeled him, in Swahili, as a white boy tourist.
This is a good book for flipping through, either to get a feel for whether you want it or someone you know would, or just to browse on occasion. Reading it straight through, the way I did, is probably not the best way to experience it.
A minor note: the book’s pages are thickish, and I found it easy to skip pages without realizing it.