Eat, Pray, Love

After a devastating divorce, Gilbert spends a year traveling, four months each in Italy, India, and Indonesia, eating, praying, and eventually loving her way toward a self she can live with. It's a premise that could easily curdle into privileged self-indulgence, and Gilbert knows it, which is the memoir's saving grace: she writes with enough self-awareness and humor to hold her own choices up to scrutiny even as she pursues them, aware of how the whole enterprise looks and doing it anyway. The prose is conversational and warm, structured as a series of short numbered sections that make it easy to read in fragments. The Italy section, given over almost entirely to the pleasure of food and language and doing nothing productive, is the most purely enjoyable; the India section, spent in an ashram wrestling with meditation and grief, is the most demanding; the Indonesia section, where the promised love arrives, is the most conventional. What has kept the book in print and in conversation is Gilbert's voice, funny, honest about her own neuroses, and willing to examine the very impulse toward self-improvement that drives the journey. This is a book for readers at a crossroads, or anyone drawn to travel writing that is really about interior travel. Readers who are skeptical of memoir-as-self-help, or who find privileged self-discovery grating, will have their reservations confirmed; the book asks you to care about one woman's spiritual accounting, and not everyone will. But Gilbert is better company than her imitators, and the humor is the thing that lasts.

Best for readers who want to finish a book feeling better about the world than when they started. The prose is accessible: you can read this quickly and it never asks too much of you. The pacing is balanced, time to breathe between moments that matter. If you're drawn to darker, more complex territory, this may feel slight.