Notes from a Small Island (1995)

While I enjoyed the book, I get the feeling I would have enjoyed it much more if my familiarity of Britain extended beyond what's essentially on the front cover. I know he probably wasn't writing for my demographic, but a skosh more context would have been nice at times. I'll definitely be picking up more by Bryson. ( )

Quite an entertaining book. Bryson is at his best when presented with oddities and eccentricities he can describe to, what he seems to presume anyway, a foreign audience who will be all agog at such just how different the British are. Its quite amusing to have our foibles pointed out by an American anyway, so this British person at least, enjoyed the book. ( )

This wasn't dreadful, but I can't say I consistently enjoyed it. Bryson and I share many interests, such as bad architecture, weird place names, and traveling around the British coast during the off-season by way of unreliable public transport. I did find this book sometimes funny and sometimes insightful, and mostly I was amused to discover that the Exeter St. David's train station had the same collection of lame, unappealing tourist brochures in the mid-nineties as it does today. Some things never change.

However, Bryson conveys the monotony of identical British high streets in crappy weather connected by counter-intuitive train routes a little too well, his humor was too reliant on his making himself sound like a jerk (I guess this is English humor), and his prose has that journalistic sameness which is the bane of good nonfiction. He uses the same five phrases to express his approbation of any given town and adores the word "fractionally." The polite term for this kind of writing is "mannerly" but I was not a big fan.

Maybe this was just not the right book of Bryson's to start with? Nevertheless, I don't think I'll be in a hurry to pick him up soon. ( )

Bryson has a humorous way of capturing the true spirit of the places he visits and the people he meets without being patronising, gushy or derisive. This book in particular is laugh-out-loud funny and truly does capture all that is wonderful, quirky, interesting and downright peculiar about the UK. I first read the book between my first and second trip to England and I found I enjoyed my second trip much more as I deliberately picked out some Bryson highlights to visit. His genuine enjoyment of even mundane things is palpable and contagious and I found myself looking at things with a far less jaded eye. I re-read this book every couple of years and find something new to delight me each time. ( )

Summary: Bill Bryson moved to Britain in the seventies, met his wife, and lived in the UK for about 20 years. Now, when he is at the point of moving his family to the United States, he sets out to travel the country that he loves so well before he leaves it behind. He travels from south to north, mostly by train, to see the many disparate corners of England. He finds that despite its small geographic size, it is a country bursting with quirks and charm, history and modernity, and while there is much at which Bryson can poke fun, there is also much to love.

Review: I picked this book up because I needed something fun, something light, something which could keep me engaged when I was distractible, but which didn't have an intricate plot that I needed to follow. And Bill Bryson is perfect for that, particularly Bryson's travel writing. Every chapter or two he's somewhere else, so I didn't get lost when I needed to put it down and pick it up later, but I find his writing so engaging that I could listen for long stretches without wanting to switch to something else.

Plus, Bryson's funny enough that it was able to lift my mood whenever I went back to it. This book was somewhat repetitive; it could easily be subtitled "In Which Bill Bryson gets cranky at modern architecture and the British Rail timetable system". In fact, some of Bryson's grumping is so repetitive that occasionally it was easy to lose track of exactly which little town that had replaced its historic buildings with bland glass-and-cement storefronts was currently making him wax curmudgeonish. This was probably not helped by the fact that as much as I am a cultural Anglophile, I have only been able to travel there briefly, and am not awesome at British geography. I could have really used a map with the various places that Bryson visits, or at least some of the larger ones, but that's always a problem with audiobooks. (Not that the paper version has a map either, but had I been reading it I could have at least pulled up Google Earth.)

I also wonder how well this book has aged. Bryson's trip is a portrait of Britain in the mid-90s; I wonder how much things have changed in the intervening 20 years. I only noticed one place where the age of the book was immediately obvious (to a non-native); it briefly mentions Princess Diana in the present tense. But while the fundamental nature of Britain may not have changed over the centuries, I have to believe that at least some aspects of its national character have evolved with the times. (Hell, when this was written, Harry Potter wasn't even a gleam in Rowling's eye.) I don't think that Bryson could write another book updating his impressions without retreading worn ground, but it would certainly be an interesting comparison.

Overall, I enjoyed this book, and it was a great fit for my mood at the time. It's clear that Bryson loves England, and that his frustrations are born out of that love, and that makes it a simultaneously fun and charming read. As far as his country-in-a-book books go, I think I liked In a Sunburned Country a little bit better, since it was a bit more varied, but Bill Bryson travel books are always reliably good. 4 out of 5 stars. ( )