Reading notes: 'Notes From a Small Island'
...by Bill Bryson.
- I'm about 20 years late here: in the mid-aughts Bryson was recommended to me often enough that I made some sort of resolution to read at least one of his books. I just now got around to it.
- Maybe I'm in fact 30 years late: this is a '90s book par excellence. The jokes about place-names wear thin quickly, but they played great in 1995. Other stuff (casual sexism, berating a McDonald's employee for no good reason) is tougher to dismiss, and certainly helps me resist the urge to over-romanticize 1995.
- ...and there's the whole concept of a book where someone like Bryson marches around Britain judging everything. One used to hear so often that if we just put Mitch Albom or Andy Rooney in charge, the world would rise high in the resulting surge of common sense. Notes from a Small Island plays hard into this sort of belief.
- Just on a sentence-by-sentence level, Bryson can really write. (Or maybe I just read so much Dave Barry in early adolescence that this sort of thing will always feel great, but I think it's mostly the former.)
- One proximate cause of my reading this is a desire to learn more about the UK, and I did find the book both pleasant and lightly educational. It's hard to recommend a book like this to the generic reader, but if you want this sort of thing, I can affirm that it does what it says on the tin.