Eat, Pray, Whatever

Photo credit Penguin Books

I finally succumbed to pressure and read Eat, Pray, Love. If you haven't heard of it, you're probably a man. This book is one of those Oprah-induced phenomena that every woman over the age of 25 seems to have read. I know several women who say this book "changed their life."

I have been hearing about it for a few years, and almost bought it on several occasions, but something held me back. I generally hate books that are "one woman's journey around the world to find her own path within her heart" type of things. I hated The Alchemist (I know, I know, that's like saying I hate baby bunnies).

But a good friend recommended it, and I was stuck in the airport for a few extra hours and decided to bite the bullet. I read it almost all in one sitting (at the airport, on the plane, on BART -- there was a lot of sitting to be done).

The good news is that I liked it more than I thought I would. The writer, Elizabeth Gilbert, is very likable and funny and a very good writer. My favorite parts were from the beginning through the section where she spent four months eating pizza in Italy. The praying part (in India) was kind of a snooze. I think she quoted one of her friends saying something like, "I so wish I wanted to do that" when she told them she was going to live in an ashram in India for four months. That's how I feel, except I don't even really wish I wanted to do that. By the time she got to Indonesia ("love"), you knew she was going to find love, so it was just a lot of skimming until she found it.

The title kind of gives the plot away, but I guess the plot is not so much the point. "It's the journey," or whatever.

Three stars, if I could Yelp it.

Of course Hollywood is turning it into a movie starring Julia Roberts. Lame. I also found out that an article Gilbert wrote for GQ was turned into the movie Coyote Ugly. Ouch.