Life Plans on Dive Bar Napkins: A guide for travelling recklessly, living stupidly

by Paul Manser

Overview

Kidnapped in the most expensive taxi inMexico.
Living like Frank Sinatra with a UTI in Palm Springs.
Avoiding exploding rubbish bins in new Tokyo.
Sleeping with man-eating spiders in Guatemala.

For better or (usually) worse, major life decisions start as a scribble on the back of a bar napkin for Paul Manser – a writer whose existence is mostly made up of stupid choices and wildly ambitious travel insurance claims.

Life Plans on Dive Bar Napkins is a book of experiences Paul always wanted to get into print, but worried that some tut-tutting travel editor would strip of all the best jokes. You could say that the book is an unnecessary act of self-indulgence by an egotist who shirks life’s responsibilities, drinks too much and thinks too little. And you’d probably be right.

Paul wrote this book for the people who want to experience something different, who drink because they enjoy it, and whose life plans begin as incoherent scrawls on the back of a dive bar napkin.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781743797464
Publisher:	Hardie Grant Children's Publishing
Publication date:	10/05/2023
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	345,350
Product dimensions:	6.25(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Paul Manser is a Melbourne-based travel writer who has been published in newspapers including The Australian, The Courier Mail, MX and The Sunday Telegraph, as well as by international media titles and travel brands such as MTV, Hearth, International Traveller, and G Adventures.

Away from writing, Paul is the personal manservant to a grumpy 11-year-old sausage dog named Bruno. He has also started four businesses, the majority of which have not resulted in being chased down the street by a reporter from A Current Affair.

Read an Excerpt

From “How to Cook a Human”

“The Wi-Fi connection drops out. Again. I would walk downstairs to complain if I wasn’t so worried about the skinny, expressionless receptionist. He seems like the kind of guy who visits a morgue afterhours to peel apart chilled corpses and sew the skin together into human pyjamas, which he later sells online with the tagline: ‘The Epidermis You Want to Be In.’”

 



 

From “Nightmare at 37,000 Feet”

“I like my travels to unfurl unplanned. I want to step out of an airport’s arrival terminal without anywhere to stay and have my nose brutally assaulted by the smell of burning petrol. I want the obnoxious urban drone of car horns, people shouting and the sounds of occasional near-death to rupture my eardrums through an open taxi window.

I would not be surprised to one day wake up in Lima without any memory, handcuffed to an angry guinea pig in what an overzealous real estate agent would loosely describe as a ‘charming fixer-upper’ but a crime reporter would later call a ‘crack-den house of horror.”

 



 

From “The Pig Pen”

“She looks horrified. The deep, Southern European tan drains from her face. It was as if she had found me crouching behind a door holding a bloodied meat cleaver and a dating guide written by Charles Manson. She shrieks, ‘You’re not wearing any underwear… Are you”

 



 

From “The Bomb Shelter”

“The Swiss have reputation as some of the most sensible, if not boring, people in Europe. To find out they were in fact mass-explosive-toting conspiracy theorists, preparing for the world’s end with underground bunkers like a giant suicide cult, is almost a pleasant surprise.”

Editorial Reviews

04/15/2024

Blending concision with tales of excess across the world, Manser’s compact debut packs a potent punch. The 33 chapters, some just a few paragraphs long, tell stories of adventure traveling—in Japan, Indonesia, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Norway, the U.S., and more— from the perspective of a man who calls the heavily mustachioed Mexican cop shaking him down for a bribe “Officer Porn Star.” The kind of adventure that Manser describes only comes when one eschews all-inclusive cruise packages and ventures freestyle into the world, armed with a quick wit, sense of adventure, a trusted buddy, and alcohol. Lots of alcohol. But this collection is more than a catalog of drunken tales. Manser’s stories are poignant, well observed, and build to bittersweet endings of not-meant-to-bes and lessons learned the hard way. Ever humble and looking for the bigger picture, Manser spares us Hemingway-esque machismo and produces a book as surprising as the locales it covers, all while holding the reader in rapt attention.

An accomplished magazine and travel writer, Manser brings readers the globe in a spare, polished, self-revealing voice. With crisp, vivid description and bursts of wit, his stories can verge from the somewhat comical to the truly frightening in short order. In describing his trip to the Arctic Circle we can feel the cold claustrophobia as his dog-hauled sled spins out of control: “My face is pushed into the snow… The sled falls over my legs. I can’t breathe.”

The stories are just as likely, though, to turn comic, as in encounters with a Guatemalan tarantula or the beautiful woman at a Reykjavik bar who notes that she could possibly be Manser’s cousin. Manser’s stylish prose is matched by a sleek layout and strong photography, with design elements that handle the chores of place-setting, freeing Manser to start his tales at their high points. The result is inviting and exciting, a triumph of travelogue and design that’s full of surprises.

Takeaway: Tautly told global travel misadventures, with a keen eye for design.

Comparable Titles: Adam Fletcher’s Don’t Come Back, Eileen Kay’s Nothing Went to Plan and Other Silver Linings.

Production grades Cover: A Design and typography: A Illustrations: N/A Editing: A Marketing copy: A

BookLife Reviews

2024-04-02
Manser presents an international travelogue in the form of a series of short stories.

The author, a Melbourne-based travel writer, offers a set of stories recounting his adventures (and misadventures) traveling around the world. Most of these stories involve his experiences in dive bars—drinking in them and sometimes getting thrown out of them. Each story is told in the form of a brief vignette (often without a clear-cut ending) featuring creative uses of various sizes of typefaces and accompanied by photographs and graphic illustrations. The narratives depict the adventures of a man who appears to be footloose and fancy free, with no responsibilities to tie him down—yet the concluding entry is about someone who is very much a family man, traveling to see his parents during the waning pandemic with his wife and baby son in tow. (“Bottom line, I guess you could say that the way I have travelled is not exactly kid friendly. Which is a little complicated given that I am now the co-owner of a 3-month-old boy called Alby. My partner, Jane, readjusts her facemask and tells me to stop standing around like an idiot, ‘Hurry up. We don’t want to be the last ones on the flight.’”) Manser’s travel stories take readers across the globe, from Palm Springs to Pamplona (for the running of the bulls) to Indonesia and back to Melbourne again. The book is a fun, engaging, and highly personal account—readers should be prepared for profanity and scatological references. That said, the author freely allows that his book will appeal to certain types of readers more than others (a refreshing admission). Essentially, Manser encourages readers to lighten up while finding time for moments for serious reflection on issues ranging from sexuality to the continued troubles of Argentina—the message and the appealing voice delivering it make for a satisfying read.

A sometimes disjointed but ultimately compelling set of travel anecdotes.

Kirkus Reviews