"Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert is a very unusual blend of travel notes, memoir, existential essays, parables in the spirit of Paulo Coelho, descriptions of Eastern spiritual practices—and… a love story. And yet the book is read not as a collection of wise sayings, but as a work of fiction—sincere, full of adventures, ironic, and unbelievably optimistic. The first desire that arises after reading is also to go somewhere—spend a year just as vividly, and maybe find yourself the way the author did.