I recently reviewed a book about how the 178 printed miles of the Oxford English Dictionary was created. Concurrent with that book, I was also listening to Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue. While I wouldn’t say that one book was better than the other, I will say that if i had to pick only one, I’d pick this one. The wider scope of Bryson’s book gives you a little bit of everything – swear words, where names from come (think about “Goldwater” for a second), why kids’ […]
Delicious morsels of trivia, with hints of cheekiness.
Bill Bryson is a delightfully dorky guy full of interesting and trivial facts. In this book, he utilizes his own English country home as a launching pad to discussing, room by room, the history of the modern home. The concept works well to take us everywhere, from the kitchen (that’s why it’s called “room and board”) to the bathroom (weirdly enough, was once considered something for poor people) to the bedroom (people love sex). I never knew I would care so much about the history […]
You Expect Me to Believe Everything You Say, Well, Okay
I wasn’t planning to review any of these books. I’ve read them all so many times, and they are all hopelessly outdated, especially Neither Here Nor There and The Lost Continent. These are books that I read and adored when I was younger, that helped me dream about a world outside of the small town I grew up in, and that even led to an aborted solo road trip when I was 21. Reading them after many years away brought back sweet memories, but there’s […]
White Dudes Walking
When I picked up this book as the April selection for my local library book club, I was puzzled. “Why are we reading a book about white dudes walking the Appalachian Trail, written in the 90s?” I still don’t have an answer to that question. I mostly find it entertaining because, as has been common in my experience, my local library book club is entirely populated with women, and white women at that, so we are an interesting audience for Bryson’s exercising in navel gazing […]
Everything in Australia wants to kill me, but I’m dying to visit anyway
This was a fun read. Bill Bryson is always fun, and this was one of the best memoirs I’ve read by him yet. Basically, it’s just Bryson in Australia in 2001. He does a lot of drinking, a lot of exploring, and a lot of trying not to get killed by the locals (animals, people, plants, whatever). It’s witty and silly and his traveling companion for the last few weeks cracked me up. Bryson has a Dave Barry-like way of describing things (or maybe Dave […]
I have seen 5 bears in Shenandoah. Suck it Bill Bryson!
This book is really funny. Unlike A Short History of Nearly Everything which is also great, this audiobook wasn’t read by Bryson. There were still a few moments where I laughed so loudly my girlfriend asked me if everything was ok. There’s one line where a deeply unpleasant woman steals a Hostess cake from Bryson’s deeply unpleasant trailmate. “Before he could react and smite her dead….” or something like that that made me laugh so hard. This book is similar to Into the Wild if you haven’t […]