Tag Archives: authors: bill bryson

2018: The Year of Bill Bryson

history, humor, memoir, non-fiction, science, travel June 17, 2019 Leave a comment

There were a couple of authors I hit heavily in 2018, the first of which being Bill Bryson.

I read/listened to:
The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain
In A Sunburned Country
At Home: A Short History of Private Life
Shakespeare: The World as Stage
A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail
Journeys in English
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
Neither Here Nor There

and, last but not least, I’m A Stranger Here Myself.

Bryson writes about history and travel, and I enjoy his wit, knowledge and humor on these subjects.

His travel books in this bunch were The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain (Bryson in Britain), In A Sunburned Country (Bryson in Australia), A Walk in the Woods (Bryson on the Appalachian Trail), and I’m A Stranger Here Myself (Bryson in America after living abroad for 20 years with his British wife).

A Walk in the Woods is probably Bryson’s most famous travel book, and it was adapted into a film starring Robert Redford and Nick Nolte in 2015. Bryson and a friend of his from high school, who he calls Stephen Katz, set off to hike the entire Appalachian Trail together. For those who don’t know, the Appalachian Trail is a marked 2,200 mile hiking trail that runs from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine and, IIRC, is the longest hiking only trail in the world. Bryson and Katz do not end up hiking the whole trail, but they do hike a good portion of it, and A Walk in the Woods is, by far, one of the funniest travel books I have ever read. The frenemy-like relationship between Bryson and Katz only adds to the hysterics, and when they accidentally pick up Maryellen as a traveling companion, the results are downright hilarious.

While all of Bryson’s books are, at points, laugh out loud funny, his travel books are uniquely humorous. The culture clashes (particularly in foreign countries and regions in the USA outside of his own), his desire to do things in a frugal manner, and his gift for capturing the characters of people he meets combine into relatable, funny experiences that anyone who has ever felt like a fish out of water can appreciate.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid was a memoir, and while funny and insightful and quite interesting, Bryson’s nostalgia for 50s and 60s America made me cringe a little. I don’t think I’m nostalgic by nature, and the 50s and 60s were a hard time for a lot of people. I just have no desire to return to the era. However, I do get Bryson’s desire for people to return to being politer and quieter.

The other books by Bryson on my list were history books. Most had a central theme, although how closely he stuck to the theme varies. At Home: A Short History of Private Life was about the history of home life and actual rooms in houses, though it branched out quite a bit. A Short History of Nearly Everything is probably Bryson’s most famous history book on my list, and it was quite interesting. It was complex but understandable, with Bryson explaining points of chemistry, geology, biology, and physics in terms the average reader can understand. It was also the only book of Bryson’s he didn’t read for his own audiobook, which was disappointing. I loved listening to Bryson read his audiobooks.

But my favorite of his history books was, of course, Shakespeare: The World as Stage. I don’t know if my love of Shakespeare has been mentioned here. I haven’t read a play on its own in quite some time – since before I started keeping this blog, I think. I read a ton of his plays growing up, for school and for fun, at least two a year for all the summers I went to Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. I haven’t been there in a while. But I love Shakespeare because of HVSF, and am fascinated by the mystery surrounding Shakespeare himself.

Bryson jumps into those mysteries head first, interviewing scholars, establishing what is and is known about the world’s most famous playwright, discussing what can be proved and disproved or neither, as well as discussing questions of authorship, lost plays, and background of cultural, social, political, and historical events of the time that influenced the work.

One thing that I found particularly interesting was that plots and characters by authors and playwrights during Shakespeare’s time were considered common property, and Shakespeare consequently used established characters and plots from other plays, most of which survive in pieces or in name only in the historical record. The plays themselves have disappeared.

The whole book was very interesting but one part that Bryson does focus on towards the conclusion of the book is that people seem determined to believe that William Shakespeare – whether they think he was a composite person or a pen name for one author or many authors – didn’t write his own works. Bryson goes on to say that the theories about who the true authors really were never seem to quite fit and that this determination also doesn’t seem to apply to other authors at the time, Ben Johnson or Christopher Marlowe being prime examples.

I think the fact that people can’t believe that Shakespeare wrote his own work kind of speaks to the work’s enduring brilliance. After all this time and all this study and scholarship, people still can’t believe that one man wrote all those plays. It’s incredible.

So that was my journey through Bill Bryson’s works. I highly recommend all of Bill Bryson’s stories. You will learn stuff, and laugh out loud doing it. I also highly recommend the audiobooks, which Bryson reads himself with his dry, humorous delivery.

One Summer: America, 1927

history, non-fiction January 16, 2017 Leave a comment

My physics teacher in high school forced us to read a history book. That was the first time I’d heard of Bill Bryson. One of the books on the list was A Short History of Nearly Everything. That was not the book I read that year. I read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Because it was the shortest. I probably would have enjoyed Bryson’s book more, looking back on it, but I was 17 and an idiot.

Bill Bryson kept popping up though – in college classes and bookstore tables. Given that history books are some of my favorites to listen to at work (where I can learn a lot, not hear EVERY detail, and not lose track of the story), I decided to finally give Bryson a try and went with One Summer: America, 1927. I have been fascinated with the 1920s for a long time, and it’s the loose theme for my upcoming nuptials. Hemingway and Fitzgerald are two of my favorite authors and two of my favorites of their books take place in the 20s, so this book as my introduction to Bryson was a natural choice.

I didn’t know anything about the book or Bryson (except that he kept popping up) going in, so the book, read by Bryson for the audio version, was surprisingly funny due to both content and Bryson himself.

Bryson uses several major events of the summer of 1927 as a lens through which to view American life, what it was and what it was going to become, while focusing on pop culture and the daily life of Americans during that time.

The major events focused on included:

+ Babe Ruth & the 1927 New York Yankees
+ Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight
+ the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 (the one event in the book I’d never heard of)
+ Henry Ford and the transition from the Model T to the Model A
+ Calvin Coolidge’s presidency the ascendance of Herbert Hoover
+ the trial and executions of Sacco & Vanzetti
+ the release of talking pictures with ‘The Jazz Singer’

…these were not the only topics touched, but they were a major focus.

I was pleasantly surprised with this book. It was a lot more interesting than I had thought it would be, and it was a lot funnier than I thought it would be. Bryson grew up in both the US and Great Britain, and his dry sense of humor was quite appealing to me.

These were topics we’d barely touched in school (Sacco and Vanzetti, Lindbergh’s flight), and in some cases not at all (they skipped over Mississippi Flood entirely, as well as anything about Henry Ford that wasn’t “hey the assembly line…”) and I found the detailed dive into these topics, and their impact on American life, a fascinating alternative high school history class.

The book also explored the contrast between the 1920s Jazz Age and the 1930s Great Depression that was looming not far down the road. Bryson also doesn’t just speak to an American audience. Babe Ruth and baseball are huge parts of the book, and so Bryson takes time to explain why Americans are so obsessed with Babe Ruth (even 90 years later) and at least the basics of baseball.

My next Bryson book will be A Walk In The Woods. One Summer: America, 1927 convinced me that I should definitely read/listen to another Bryson book.