AS someone who rarely steps outside the Greater York conurbation, travel books are not normally my thing.

Jealousy plays a part. I'd rather not know that there are people making a living by swanning around warm exotic places, and I'm certainly not about to subsidise their fun.

But this book sounded different. The blurb suggested that The Extinction Club was more than a travel book. It said Robert Twigger began by writing about an endangered species, a badly-designed deer called Milu. Then he was distracted by "other fascinating subjects. Why the Chinese forgot how to make clocks, for instance. Or Edmund Backhouse, secret agent, swindler and raging Victorian pervert".

Hmm. It sounded better than the usual "my journey of self-discovery among the folk of St Tropez" guff. The Extinction Club begins well. Twigger writes with a swagger. He has enough belief in his own style to swap long chapters for brief anecdotes, some personal, some historic.

At first he does enough to convince you that wherever his brain rambles, it is worth following behind.

But by half way through, I found my own mind wandering. Twigger had been indulged far too much by his publishers. I wanted a story, something coherent, not just one man's search for an Egyptian second hand bookshop with sun-lounger philosophy chucked in.

This is nothing more than a journal of Twigger's year not writing the book he was commissioned to write. Unhappily, it only reinforced my prejudices: that travel writers are too smug by half.

Updated: 08:54 Wednesday, July 03, 2002