Shakespeare) are outstanding, but it was the travel narratives that left the deepest impression.īill Bryson introduced me to travel literature, meaning that prior to A Walk in the Woods, I didn’t know the category existed. Subsequently, I was hooked and devoured most of Bryson’s other efforts. My first Bryson read was A Walk in the Woods, giddily passed around my workplace, and hurriedly followed by the prequel to The Road to Little Dribbling: Notes from a Small Island – the book that made Bill a celebrity in Britain and supposedly outsold more than any other travelogue.
However, after the millennial publication of his romp around Australia, Bryson diversified, penning books about science (A Short History of Nearly Everything), his youth (The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid), the Bard of Avon (Shakespeare), and everything from the spice trade (At Home) to baseball (One Summer). From his debut, The Lost Continent (1989), to Down Under (2000), the cerebral yet comedic author from Des Moines, Iowa helped resuscitate the travel narrative and take it mainstream. Travel literature is the genre that made Bill Bryson famous. The Road to Little Dribbling reaffirms his stature as a master of the travel narrative-and a really, really funny guy. Nothing is more entertaining than Bill Bryson on the road-and on a tear. With his matchless instinct for the funniest and quirkiest and his unerring eye for the idiotic, the bewildering, the appealing, and the ridiculous, he offers acute and perceptive insights into all that is best and worst about Britain today.
Now he has traveled about Britain again, by bus and train and rental car and on foot, to see what has changed-and what hasn’t.įollowing (but not too closely) a route he dubs the Bryson Line, from Bognor Regis in the south to Cape Wrath in the north, by way of places few travelers ever get to at all, Bryson rediscovers the wondrously beautiful, magnificently eccentric, endearingly singular country that he both celebrates and, when called for, twits.
The result was Notes from a Small Island, a true classic and one of the bestselling travel books ever written. Twenty years ago, Bill Bryson went on a trip around Britain to discover and celebrate that green and pleasant land. Prepare for total joy and multiple episodes of unseemly laughter. A loving and hilarious-if occasionally spiky-valentine to Bill Bryson’s adopted country, Great Britain.
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