Neil Hayward

Now that I've been emancipated from crutches and taxis, I'm back to being able to enjoy audiobooks again, and after a small audio spree, I have quite a backlog to choose from. I started with this one; even if I'm not quite up to bush walking while looking through a camera lens yet, I'm definitely ready to hear about someone else's adventures.

Unfortunately, this was only a little more than half of what I'd hoped it would be. Neil Hayward's 'accidental' big year was a lot of fun to listen to/read about, and his last minute travel itineraries boggled the mind. I loved every birding minute of this book. But this book is also as much about the angst he suffered in his personal life, at least some of which was due to clinical depression, and not a little also due to an extraordinary pessimism he blamed on his British upbringing. I avoid gross generalisations about people on a nation-wide basis, but Hayward did resemble an old boyfriend of mine, who lived in England, more than a little bit. Regardless, I was in a mood to read about wild and uncommon adventures in birding, not girlfriend/career/mental illness angst, so I found these parts of the narrative tedious. A few times at the start I considered DNF'ing because there was so. much. angst. But once he embraced the goal to see as many birds as possible in one year (limited to US/Canada -Hawaii), the book held my interest more often than not, and ultimately left me satisfied.

The narrator did a very creditable job.… (mere)