No Touch Monkey!: And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late

by Ayun Halliday

Book Overview

Zine queen Ayun Halliday confesses the best-and worst-of her globetrotting misadventures. "I laughed hard on nearly every page of this shockingly intimate memoir and deeply funny book." -- Stephen Colbert Ayun Halliday may not make for the most sensible travel companion, but she is certainly one of the zaniest, with a knack for inserting herself (and her unwitting cohorts) into bizarre situations around the globe. Curator of kitsch and unabashed aficionada...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1580056016
• ISBN13: 9781580056014
• Release Date: August 2015
• Publisher: Seal Press (CA)
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.4" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

NO Touch Monkey

This book had me laughing out loud on the plane - more than once! I couldn't read it fast enough and was so sad when it was over! Granted, I'm glad I got to read it and not experience some of these events with her! She can be coarse and she can be wild but Ayun is definitely entertaining. Her humor and openness show how traveling with great expectations or 'written in stone' itineraries is the best way to miss the experience you were looking for. I'm just glad I'm not her mother!!!

Nosh, Plea, Lust

Ayun Halliday isn't for everyone--if you're looking for an Under the Tuscan Sun/Eat Pray Love/Year in Provence type of travelogue-cum-memoir, you probably will be let down. If you're looking for something romantically unromantic that tells stories that you yourself wouldn't have the chutzpah to repeat (and, admit it, we've all been in a No Touch Monkey situation) and that leaves you looking up cheap flights on Orbitz afterward, you'll find a gem in NTM. Contrary to some other hypotheses postulated here, Halliday is not a trust fund baby or a gadabout living on Mommy and Daddy's money--something that you'll find if you actually read the book. Like many of us who squirrel away birthday money, pittance salaries from temp jobs, and the odd survey or side gig in order to get a train pass or RyanAir ticket, Ayun's moments of sugar packet desserts, train-station bathroom showers, and sleeping in leaf piles are not the makings of a trip funded on a bottomless ATM. Nor do we want those trips to be; there wouldn't be much worth relating if everything was smooth sailing (see: the Titanic, Donner Party, Exodus, etc.). Mundane? It's a subjective word. I completely respect the opinion that one may consider the more exciting story to be seeing the Taj Mahal than reclaiming a shoe from a primate creature. However I've read about the seven wonders of the world. Exponentially so. I'd rather hear the small stories that get passed around at the bar, because those are stories that most people probably won't re-live themselves. Are there more ways to tell the story? Sure. Are they just as good? Absolutely. Are they better? No, just different. Similarly, I didn't get the complaint/whine factor that other reviewers have mentioned. I got a wry, quirky recount of events that are at turns bizarre, uncomfortable, but ultimately wondrous. Geoff Dyer by way of David Rakoff or Sarah Vowell. I was so thankful to have found this book; a great train or plane read that left me both wanting to fast forward to the last pages and wanting the book to continue past the last page. Like most vagabondish trips, it's not perfect, but I wouldn't have wanted it to be any different.

Quirky, original, and really, really funny

I've read many, many books of travel essays-- and am always a fan of humorous ones-- but Ayun Halliday's book is my favorite, by far. "No Touch Monkey" is a riot from page one, and I had such a hard time putting it down that-- I swear this is true-- I kept reading it while I was in labor with my fourth child. (Yes, an epidural helped with that). She is so funny and at the same time so vulnerable-- never afraid to delve into her own bad hygiene, grievous errors in judgment, or embarrassing situations if it's likely to give the reader a good belly laugh. It takes courage to write that way. There is an innocence and sense of adventure to her viewpoint that makes her writing original and a pleasure to read. I look forward to much more from her-- traveling with her children, perhaps? Uh-oh!

Great read! And i hate to read!

i have a slight and manageable learning disability that makes reading a bit of a chore, so if a book doesn't hold my interest, i don't read it. and i read this book start to finish and enjoyed every bit of it with the exception of the author's too-evocative description of her dislocated knee (perhaps because i'm a nurse it was too easy visualize). anyway......... the style is fluid and friendly, the stories are alternately funny andevocative and it's got the ability to create the 'you were there' feeling necessary to distinguish one travel book from the hundreds of travel books written by people who shouldn't write travel books. Best praise i can offer: i'm now going to search out her other books

I love this book!

I couldn't put this book down. I'm a sucker for a fearless narrator willing to lay out the unflattering details of her life. How anyone could find fault with this book's hilarious imagery and honest unfolding is beyond me. Ayun Halliday is a gifted story teller. The final essay in this book is wrenching and beautiful. Immediately after reading "No Touch Monkey" I read "The Big Rumpus" and I love that so much I ordered "Job Hopper". It didn't let me down. My only regret is that I didn't write these books myself.