Books like The Girls' Global Guide to Guys

This is a lightweight read -- and I feel a bit suckered for completing it because it is set just after the first dot-com collapse and the protagonist basically has the same job that I had at the time, though she was about 7 years my junior. She wants to be a writer -- but doesn't spend much time or effort doing research or getting out and seeing the world. To rectify this, and maybe find true love in the process (aka "fuck your way across Western Europe") -- she takes off on a 4 week trip with her friend. It's sort of "Pollyanna goes to Europe" but with sex. Our protagonist is not afraid to share her insecurities, preconceptions and naïveté with us because she doesn't seem to know better. She thinks she's more mature and clever than she is -- this comes across frequently. For example, the Australian love interest of her friend makes jokes about religion and says he would start his own religion where everyone would just give him all their money, and all the female followers would have to be be available to have sex with him. This is seen as HILARIOUS by the protagonist who says something like "I love that Pete is so smart and funny and feels comfortable being himself." Never mind that the rest of us see him as a cringe-worthy troglodyte. Another example is the explicitly detailed sexual attraction between our protagonist and her vacation-fling -- starting off with chaste snuggles and infatuation, then unprotected sex and annoyance with each other. She even describes her feelings about post-sex wet panties as a barometer of her feelings toward a guy (I can't imagine it being a GOOD feeling, ever). She also uses the reading of her love interest's decreased tolerance of her vegetarianism as a barometer -- and yet she's surprised when he decides to break away from the group and go off on his own trip. She should have said "Good riddance!" and dumped him sooner, when he started being crabby, fussy and rude.The entire trip through Europe seems improbably jam packed -- I would love to see what that itinerary looked like -- they hit all the big tourist attractions in London, Paris (even Versailles), Florence, Venice, Rome and then head to Greece (another bus trip tour) but it seems improbable that trip is only 4 weeks!The book is also impossibly white, with the exception of "gypsy thieves" mentioned a few times during the Italy parts of the trip (my trips to Europe in the same time frame were full of Northern African immigrants on the streets of Paris and Florence). The protagonist also has some conflicted attitudes toward beauty - she describes the women she meets and interviews about their "worst date ever" in details and terms not used for men she meets. In one case, she describes a woman as so beautiful that she feels like she should punch her in the face (wow - internalized misogyny, much?).Early in the book - and repeated at least three or four times -- our protagonist describes her "disastrous" love life, that includes "getting hit on by a string of lesbians."It makes me wonder whether our protagonist is, in fact, deeply closeted about her attraction to woman and not nearly as much to men -- causing her to make disastrous choices in romantic relationships with men.In the end -- our protagonist seems to realize that she has to put in some effort to get something she wants, and she does some research, follows up with her European trip contacts (the women, of course) and puts together some articles that sell. It would be great to see a follow-up to this where she comes clean about her attraction to woman and stops pursuing dead-end relationships with men.