Eat, Pray, Love

"This won't be a full review because I couldn't finish the book. I only got to the first trip to Italy and stopped. I couldn't relate to any of it even though I have felt soul crushing depression before and didn't really want children because I wanted to travel. It doesn't seem like you get to know much about any of the other characters she encountered so I just felt like I was in her head the entire time and it was pretty exhausting. Maybe it turned out better if I were to keep going but it just made me feel depressed and a little stressed out."

"This is one of my all time favorite books! In my top 10 list!"

"Soul searching. It will have you wondering about the things that are going on in your life"

"This book spends a lot of time focusing on the value of spending time with your thoughts. Traveling Italy on a solo adventure, digging deeper into a meditation practice at the cradle of a religious movement, or allowing yourself to fall in love on an island in the south Asian sea, for our author none of the life-altering changes can come to fruition if we do not know ourselves."

"3.5 stars, somewhat reluctantly rounded up. <br/><br/>To be honest, I expected to hate-read and dismissive this book throughout. I anticipated a vapid, selfish, flaky new-age spirituality memoir which I’d roll my eyes at and enjoy solely in a fluffy way. <br/><br/>Gilbert surprised me with rather more depth than I anticipated. While I still find her deeply and problematically grounded in Western individualism and too quickly papering over the profound experiential differences between religions in favour of a piecemeal “all paths lead to the same ocean” philosophy (which any good phenomenologist of religion will quickly call out), her spiritual journey was honest and true. She did her best to ground herself into a tradition - a Vedic yoga tradition primarily - and trust the rules and process. <br/><br/>Clearly, I found her spiritual journey the most compelling; I did not resonate with her divorce and healing journey personally. It’s simply not in my experience, but I appreciated that it helped flesh out in detail what her thoughts were along her spiritual path. <br/><br/>I don’t agree with all of her morality, but I don’t need to to appreciate pieces of this book. I’m grateful for the inspiration to pray more, to not be afraid of silence, and to seek to accept myself in God’s love. Really I can hardly expect more from most memoirs, especially non-religious ones! <br/><br/>So I stand corrected. Eat Pray Love can be a touch hedonistic and individualistic and may not stand up to intense analysis, but it’s honest and even somewhat inspirational."

"It was funny, engaging, honest and inspirational."

"Although I enjoyed Gilbert's writing style and appreciated her honest self-assessment, the book was a little uneven for me. I connected with some parts better than others, and simply couldn't get myself away from the thought, "Okay, so how does this all translate to <i>real</i> life?" So few of us actually get the opportunity to have an all-expense-paid escape-from-it-all experience for a year. <br/><br/>However, that being said, Gilbert doesn't write this as a prescriptive book so much as a descriptive one. In other words, she doesn't say, "Y'all should do this, it's the only way to be fully human!" Rather, she sticks to simply describing her own experience. She is grateful for her own opportunity and what it afforded her, which I appreciated. And yet, I'm not sure how much I can actually take away from it for myself. I do like some of the realizations she had; I can't entirely buy into others. But I have friends who have loved this book and it's changed their own worldviews in some way or another. So, like most books of this nature, what you get out of it all depends on who you are, where you are in your life (physically- and emotionally-speaking), and what you bring to the reading of the book in the first place. For me, I didn't hate reading it the way I was a little afraid I would, but it also didn't give me any great new insights."

"Just got a little bored. I saw the movie and liked it but the book kind of rambles. Maybe I should have read that first and then saw the movie?"

"Eh, privileged woman travels the world for self discovery. Not really much to this book. Only thing I got out of it is a really really want to go to Italy and eat"

"I really enjoyed this book, but as a warning to those who have not read it - it is very self indulgent so if you don't like that, stay away."