The incredibly witty Bill Bryson wrote this book twenty years ago. After spending twenty years in the UK, having acquired a wife and family, the American was about to return to the states. Thus, in search for some material, he toured Britain on foot and public transport. Although he is one of the few writers who can make you laugh out loud, I guess I find it too difficult to get too excited about investing the time to read over three hundred pages of stream-of-consciousness ramblings. That said, his description of what he calls 'Glaswegian' and his attempts to translate are hysterical. The book is impossible to summarize, so I've decided to use this post as a to-do list of places to visit, if I ever get back there and spend time outside of London: the Great Lawn at Cambridge, Salisbury Cathedral, Lincoln, the Merseyside Maritime Museum, the Lake District, Durham, Edinburgh, and the Yorkshire Dales. He never mentions the one place I've always been fascinated by - Hadrian's Wall.
He just wrote a follow up called "the road to little dribbling" that's getting savaged in reviews I read. He is great, and in a recent NYT by the book segment gave a shout out to the Landmark history series for having a big impact on him as a kid
ReplyDeleteThe landmark mention generated a handful of letters to thre editor of the book review section on 1/31. Apparently Bennet Cerf started the series and over 180 were written, using writers like a Pearl Buck, Robert Penn Warren and Shirley Jackson
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