Post by Return of the Thin Olive Duke on Sept 9, 2015 0:06:16 GMT -5
Geek Obsession: Bill Bryson
Why it's daunting: Bill Bryson is a man who asks a lot of questions. In his memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, he describes neglecting his paper route as his mind constantly wanders toward seemingly unanswerable questions, like why suit jackets have four random buttons on the sleeves, or why the ground around the Pantheon is so much higher than it was in ancient times (anyone with ADD should recognize this immediately). It's a habit that continued into his adulthood, which drove him to something most of us don't: actually finding out the answers. With a career spanning thirty years and nineteen nonfiction books including travelogues, histories, and even reference publications, Bryson has gone a long way toward solving the riddles of modern life, but it's hard to know where to start.
Possible gateway: Notes from a Small Island and A Walk in the Woods.
Why? Notes from a Small Island depicts Bryson's farewell tour of Great Britain, where he had lived from 1973 to 1994 (and returned later in life). An avowed Anglophile (with the guest audio-tours to prove it; if you ever go to the Roman ruins in Bath he's worth a listen), he does not shy away from criticisms of the country, particularly the Thatcher and Major ministries, while constantly encountering reminders of why he'll miss the place.
His immediate follow-up, A Walk in the Woods, has Bryson getting reacquainted with his native United States by walking the Appalachian Trail with his estranged, troublemaking high-school friend Stephen Katz, an experience which turns out to be very different than he expected. In each book, he digresses from his own observations to shed some light on the science, history, and then-current events of his surroundings.
Next Steps: Bryson's first book, The Palace under the Alps, is out of print, so I can't comment on it's quality, but the Mother Tongue is his earliest non-travel book still available, and I've seen it used as a reference material in introductory linguistics courses because of its accessibility. He really does have fun with the principles of linguistics as well as the history and current evolution of English, a sensibility that returns in his later books At Home and One Summer: 1927.
On the travel side of things, I'd recommend Down Under, also known in the US as In a Sunburned Country. Bryson's travels through Australia easily provide the most laughs of any of his books, and stands pretty well on its own.
Next Next Steps: Neither Here nor There has Bryson retracing (semi-faithfully) his second journey to Europe during college with the aforementioned Katz. It's a pretty good snapshot of Europe at the very end of the Cold War and is funny as hell to boot, but feels very much like one episode in an ongoing series, and is probably best saved until you've read some of his other books. Likewise, his memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is great fun to read; I would even recommend it to middle school or really advanced elementary kids, but for the adult reader it's best saved for later. A Brief History of Nearly Everything is also good for those who are just getting into the hard sciences, but can be a bit of a departure from his other work.
Where Not to Start: Notes from a Big Country is a collection of Bryson's semi-regular musings from the Sunday Telegraph documenting his first few years back in America. It's a neat time capsule of the late 1990s, but a lot of it is not very interesting; most of the good stuff was later used to better effect in later books, so it kinda reads like a first draft. Similarly, The Lost Continent is interesting mainly as a document of how fucked up America was in the late '80s, but isn't very enlightening otherwise. And Made In America, Bryson's history of American English, is plenty comprehensive, but has a few errors and can be somewhat clunky for the casual reader.
Note: A Walk in the Woods has been adapted into a film currently in limited release; Bryson's new book The Road to Little Dribbling will be out in October.
Why it's daunting: Bill Bryson is a man who asks a lot of questions. In his memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, he describes neglecting his paper route as his mind constantly wanders toward seemingly unanswerable questions, like why suit jackets have four random buttons on the sleeves, or why the ground around the Pantheon is so much higher than it was in ancient times (anyone with ADD should recognize this immediately). It's a habit that continued into his adulthood, which drove him to something most of us don't: actually finding out the answers. With a career spanning thirty years and nineteen nonfiction books including travelogues, histories, and even reference publications, Bryson has gone a long way toward solving the riddles of modern life, but it's hard to know where to start.
Possible gateway: Notes from a Small Island and A Walk in the Woods.
Why? Notes from a Small Island depicts Bryson's farewell tour of Great Britain, where he had lived from 1973 to 1994 (and returned later in life). An avowed Anglophile (with the guest audio-tours to prove it; if you ever go to the Roman ruins in Bath he's worth a listen), he does not shy away from criticisms of the country, particularly the Thatcher and Major ministries, while constantly encountering reminders of why he'll miss the place.
His immediate follow-up, A Walk in the Woods, has Bryson getting reacquainted with his native United States by walking the Appalachian Trail with his estranged, troublemaking high-school friend Stephen Katz, an experience which turns out to be very different than he expected. In each book, he digresses from his own observations to shed some light on the science, history, and then-current events of his surroundings.
Next Steps: Bryson's first book, The Palace under the Alps, is out of print, so I can't comment on it's quality, but the Mother Tongue is his earliest non-travel book still available, and I've seen it used as a reference material in introductory linguistics courses because of its accessibility. He really does have fun with the principles of linguistics as well as the history and current evolution of English, a sensibility that returns in his later books At Home and One Summer: 1927.
On the travel side of things, I'd recommend Down Under, also known in the US as In a Sunburned Country. Bryson's travels through Australia easily provide the most laughs of any of his books, and stands pretty well on its own.
Next Next Steps: Neither Here nor There has Bryson retracing (semi-faithfully) his second journey to Europe during college with the aforementioned Katz. It's a pretty good snapshot of Europe at the very end of the Cold War and is funny as hell to boot, but feels very much like one episode in an ongoing series, and is probably best saved until you've read some of his other books. Likewise, his memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is great fun to read; I would even recommend it to middle school or really advanced elementary kids, but for the adult reader it's best saved for later. A Brief History of Nearly Everything is also good for those who are just getting into the hard sciences, but can be a bit of a departure from his other work.
Where Not to Start: Notes from a Big Country is a collection of Bryson's semi-regular musings from the Sunday Telegraph documenting his first few years back in America. It's a neat time capsule of the late 1990s, but a lot of it is not very interesting; most of the good stuff was later used to better effect in later books, so it kinda reads like a first draft. Similarly, The Lost Continent is interesting mainly as a document of how fucked up America was in the late '80s, but isn't very enlightening otherwise. And Made In America, Bryson's history of American English, is plenty comprehensive, but has a few errors and can be somewhat clunky for the casual reader.
Note: A Walk in the Woods has been adapted into a film currently in limited release; Bryson's new book The Road to Little Dribbling will be out in October.