Going with the Grain: A Wandering Bread Lover Takes a Bite Out of Life Book

I like to read about others' travels in foreign lands, local cuisine and culture, and bread. So naturally, I thought mixing these all together would add up to a really enjoyable read. Sadly, however, it didn't. While I learned a bit about the cultural history and some snippets of life in the different places the author traveled to, I found the bread thread to be a thin excuse to hold this book together. It appeared to me that Susan was being paid to travel to exotic places under the guise of researching the local bread but in fact she didn't seem to actually enjoy her experiences. Maybe she was just doing it for the money. Something in her tone was critical, judgmental, or just plain snarky when she was writing about the people or places or food she encountered. I understand that man cannot live on bread alone, but this woman's book would have benefited if she loved to bake bread herself. And she admitted up front that she really doesn't bake at all. There was something lacking in the book. Or maybe there was just too much of her in it and too little of her real love of bread. Or traveling. Or foreign places too, for that matter.