Seeing Further

Seeing Further: The Story of Science, Discovery, and the Genius of the Royal Society
© 2010 Bill Bryson
512 pages

Although Bill Bryson is  chiefly known for his humorous travelogues, he has been known to venture into other nonfiction at times, and in fact the first science book I ever read for fun outside of high school was his A Short History of Nearly Everything.   I wasn’t too surprised, then, to see his name on a history of the Royal Society.  What did come as a surprise was the tenor of the contents, because Bryson was the editor here rather than the author, and the contributing scientists deliver a far more thoughtful history than I’d anticipated, one that’s almost introspective.  Rather than a straightforward chronicle of discoveries made and lines of thought pursued year by year,  the essays are more  thematic, emphasizing  through moments and movements  the evolution of natural philosophy and the development of a distinct discipline which rebuilt the world. (The history of the Royal Society itself appears at the beginning of the book, then the individuals and their contributions take over.  One of the earliest essays, dwelling on the rise of scientific materialism,  argues that the greatest disruption to traditional thought was the idea that the entire cosmos was made of the same material thing, that the stars had fallen from a heavenly realm and were instead pedestrian, subject to the same laws as apples and the dead leaves of autumn. In the monist world, where was the otherworldly?  Another explores the tension between logic-driven natural philosophers and experiential ones in the late medieval period, whose work would eventually dovetail together. It’s not all introspection, as chapters on the important of mathematics (undergirding science) and engineering (applying science) bring us out of the clouds and closer to earth.  

The World as Stage

Shakespeare: The World as Stage
© 2007 Bill Bryson
245 pages

Shakespeare: The World as Stage surprised me when it arrived. Such a slender little volume for a man whose legacy is strong even today!  Bryson’s aim is not to deliver a volume of literary criticism, or even to fix on some minor detail and create an revisionist vision of Shakespeare, but to stick to the facts.  As it turns out, there aren’t that many.  While we know bounds more about Shakespeare than many of his contemporaries -- and more of his works have survived him than them as well --  the man didn’t leave much documentation.    In creating a narrative that connects the few facts we have  -- birth,  employment as an actor, success as a  playwright, death --  Bryson also supplies background information about Elizabethan and Jamesian England, and concludes that Shakespeare’s greatest accomplishment was not “Hamlet”, but rather managing to survive childhood.   England was plagued by disease after disease, so much so that public records sometimes inserted the phrase (in Latin), “here begins plague”, as if to assure future historians that no, this isn’t an error, that many people really did die in that April with its shoures soote. 

If a reader is looking for a light history of Shakespeare that won’t lead them off the road into some niche theory of the bard,  Bryson here provides a concise, cautious, and enjoyable biography of the man and his times that will fill the bill admirably.

The Lost Continent

The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America
© 1989 Bill Bryson

When I read The Road to Little Dribbling, full of Bryson complaining and thinking murderously about people who so much as annoyed him, I returned it disappointed. "Bryson's turned into a real crank," I thought. The Lost Continent makes me think he's always been that way, he just hides it better in some books than others.

This book chronicles Bryson's attempt to apparently re-live his childhood road trips, often following the very routes his father chose to get lost on in those bygone summers. That can only be a beginning, however, because by the end of the book he has visited (or at least zoomed through) all but eight of the 48 states, Hawaii and Alaska being frauds. Although billed as a tour of small-town America, he zooms through several larger cities as well. (One, Los Angeles, is pointedly avoided.) The book consists of Bryson chattering along as he drives, recounting stories of his family's travel misadventures, complaining about the view (or rarely, admiring it), or venturing into completely irrelevant terrain. When he is not being an utter pill -- heaping scorn on any development that is not a 18th century mansion, or raging against locals for being ignorant, too friendly, too suspicious, etc, Bryson can be funny. To an extent he's funny when attacking people, but it grows obnoxious after a while.

Related:
I'm a Stranger Here, Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years, Bill Bryson

I'm a Stranger Here Myself

I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America after Twenty Years Away
© 1999 Bill Bryson
288 pages

"It's been a funny  old night, when you think of it. I mean to say, wife drowns, ship sinks, and there was no Montrachet '07 at dinner.I had to settle for a very middling '05."

After living in Yorkshire for twenty years, Bill Bryson and his family decided to go for a change of scenery and moved to America. For him, it was a return, though not to his home.  To be sure, New Hampshire was much different from his native Iowa, but America itself had changed in the intermin, in ways both bewildering and delighting.  I'm a Stranger Here Myself collects various columns Bryson wrote about life in late-90s America, most of them funny.  Bryson is not the cranky old man of Road to Little Dribbling, but here only a late-middle age father who insists on inflicting his childhood memories on his children, only to discover that dumpy motels and drive-in movie theaters aren't nearly as fun as they used to be. There are also a couple of satirical pieces -- fake computer instructions, fake IRS directions, and a morbidly funny story from the last night of the Titanic. (Inspired, no doubt, by the move release.) A few of the pieces are personal in nature, merely Bryson making fun of himself for being an absent-minded fuddy-duddy who has a tendency to  mail his pipe tobacco instead of his letters and frequently needs to phone his wife to be reminded why exactly he's in town.  Other times, he is more serious, as when he comments on the loss of local accents and the impending doom threatened by everyone driving everywhere instead of walking, like the English do. (The one time he tries walk across the street  in America, he is nearly run over.)   There's also a chapter called 'Our Town', which mourns the loss of small-town America -- which I was happily surprised by. I've been thinking about buying Bryson's book about travels through small towns,but assumed Bryson would sneer at them for being provincial. Instead, he's as sentimental about them as I am, so don't be surprised to see The Lost Continent pop up here within the next few months or so.

The Road to Little Dribbling

The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain
© 2015 Bill Bryson
380 pages

"When people asked me where I was bound, I could gaze toward the northern horizon with a set expression and say 'Cape Wrath, God willing'. I imagined my listeners giving a low whistle of admiration and reply 'Gosh, that's a long way.' I would nod in grim acknowledgment. 'Not even sure if there's a tearoom,' I would add."

p. 14

Bill Bryson is turning into a cranky old man, evidenced by his ramblings on The Road to Little Dribbling.  Bryson's mark is funny travelogues, a recording of the people and places he visits as he wanders through Australia or the Appalachian trail, supported by errant reminiscences that such sights inspire.  At the outset of Road to Little Dribbling, Bryson is about to take the British citizenship test after having lived in England for several decades. (He encountered a stray English rose, and married her.)  Rendered nostalgic by the prospect of finally making his relationship with Britain formal, Bryson decides to take a tour of the isle, traveling from Bognor Regis to Cape Wrath, the longest NS axis he could figure.  While he earnestly does not want to repeat his journey in  Notes from a Small Island, in which he repeated the journey he made the first time he ever traveled to Britain (Bill is evidently short for Bilbo) --  the title of it comes up a lot, like the expression "Back in my day" in the mouth of a marooned resident of a nursing home.

The book is taken up with him riding trains, suffering car rentals, and going on long walks, musing and having interactions with people that typically end in him thinking nasty things about them.  Herein lies the big splotch on this book: either I never picked up on it before, or Bryson is growing increasingly nasty with age, because he's constantly contemplating the murder  or convenient death of people. They don't even have to be people who are failing to deliver customer service; they can be politicians he's heard wicked things about on the telly.   What he finds is is that while there are many signs of things going downhill -- old women stiffing on tips, train routes being neglected, American-style sprawl, buildings literally falling into the sea because of coastal erosion that is surely the government's fault, somehow --    Britain has mostly remained a charming place. (Except for Scotland, which has gotten too weirdly nationalistic for his culinary taste.)

 The Road to Little Dribbling is riven with cranky potholes, more crabby than funny. I've read quite a few of Bryson's travel tales, and this will rank last among them.

Read of England 2012

Last week, Britons celebrated or observed Guy Fawkes Night on 5 November, a date I usually try to do some English-themed reading around, just as I do readings for the Fourth of July and Bastille Day. This year's reading consisted of my finishing off Bernard Cornwell's excellent King Arthur trilogy, along with two nonfiction works: Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island and Kate Fox's Watching the English: the Hidden Rules of English Behaviour.

To start off my set, I decided to take a tour of Britain with Bill Bryson, an American humorist author who lived in England for twenty years, beginning in the 1970s.  Before returning to the United States, Bryson decided to mull over his adopted homeland  by traveling over it, in part repeating the journey he made upon first arriving. Bryson is a riotous author for me, and here he's of course an entertaining guide, cheerfully rambling through the country, offering commentary that varies from serious reflections on English culture to absurd thoughts and irrelevant tangents.  At the outset, when repeating his initial 1970s travels, the commentary  compares the Britain of his youth to Britain today, though the changes he notes (in the flowering of chain stores, the destruction of older architectural for modern boxes) are scarcely for the better.  Even so, this is a delightfully fun book.

Kate Fox's Watching the English takes a more serious tack, slightly so. The author has a earnest endeavor -- scrutinizing English culture with an anthropologist's eye -- but she offers a spirited analysis. Although her intent is to discern the rules governing English behavior by watching how Britons act, she's no passive observer,  instead turning her fellow Brits into lab rats and experimenting on them. She devotes afternoons to jumping queues (cutting into lines) and bumping into people on purpose, noting how many of them automatically apologize. As she studies one area of English life after another -- work, hobbies, sex, shopping -- patterns emerge, rules which interact with one another, and eventually the patterns create a cohesive analysis of English culture. Fox declares that the English are fundamentally socially anxious, and that many English behaviors act to counter that awkwardness. The weather, for instance, is not actually all that interesting to English folk, regardless how how incessantly they speak of it: instead, talking about the weather is a way to be social without being impolite, to make a human connection without seeming weird.  Fox sees her countrymen and women as being desperate for fellowship, but denied it by a culture that encourages emotional coolness -- reserve, moderation, and the respect of privacy. Other aspects of English culture she touches on are the prevalence of class consciousness (which is ubiquitous, being expressed and betrayed not just by the word you use to describe household furniture, but which items you are willing to buy from a Mark's and Spencer), English humor, and a fundamental belief in fair play.  While I can't judge her book against personal experience (not yet having traveled  to England's green and pleasant land), I found it utterly engaging and entertainingly written.

At Home

At Home: A Short History of Private Life
© 2011 Bill Bryson
512 pages

How much history and how many laughs can you put under one roof? Take a tour of Bill Bryson's old English home with him and find out.  At the outset of the book, Bryson shares a few experiences in and around his home which impressed upon him the fact that there's a great deal of fascinating history bound up in the mundane environment we take most for granted; our houses. And so, he labors to tell the stories of his house -- of all of houses, and of civilization in general.

A guided visit through his house, room, by room, frames a collection of essays covering the entire range of human activity and history. Some topics are directly connected to the room in question. For instance, when writing on the kitchen Bryson treats the reader to a history of salt and spice -- after assuring us that nothing we touch today will have "more bloodshed, suffering, and woe [...] than the innocuous twin pillars of your salt and pepper shaker."  Other connections are more tenuous: while in the cellar, Bryson rambles cheerfully on about the materials used in homebuilding, and a journey into the garden merits a discussion on public parks. Each room inspires several different but connected sets of thoughts; the kitchen is also a place to discussion nutrition. While the Victorian period in America and England provides the setting of most of Bryson's thoughts, they cover most of western history.

At Home is enormously entertaining, not just to serious-minded students of history who are honestly fascinating by brick-making and the tools of Neanderthals, but to those who enjoy the absurd and grotesque -- history abounds in little stories that make modern audiences' jaws drop in horror or disbelief, and Bryson is a gleeful sharer of those tales. If the content doesn't make you laugh, Bryson's dry wit in delivering these stories will.

Recommended to those who want some light reading that will provide laughs and sneak in a little history to boot.

In a Sunburned Country

In a Sunburned Country
© 2001 Bill Bryson
352 pages

Bill Bryson takes on the largest island in the world in In a Sunburned Country,  traveling its coasts and dashing into the heart of the outback to gaze upon some of the most wondrous natural scenery to be found on Earth in around three weeks. Though some of his other journey books take place on foot, Australia is far too vast to experience in such a way. Even by train and rental car, much of the trip is marked by hours of travel through the wilderness. Bryson spends most of his time in Australia's cities, though, most of which are clustered in the southern 'boomerang'.   Like A Walk in the Woods, Bryson begins his journey by reading about the terrifying perils that await him -- especially the wildlife -- and later uses this knowledge to entertain and terrify those who travel with him. Aside from the pleasure he takes in doing this, Bryson seems like an agreeable fellow to explore a new place with -- he pokes his nose into every facet of life he can, never ceases to ask questions or make witty observations, and prefers to end days on the road by exploring local communities, winding up at a pub wiling away the hours.

In addition to describing his travel experiences, Bryson also engages the reader with a history of Australia, its provinces and towns, and also provides the odd science lesson -- commenting on how Australia's isolation led to its incredible and varied abundance of animals and plants, many of which can be found no other place on earth. To Bryson, Australia is an immense paradise -- teeming with life, and yet bizarrely empty. That abundance of life is all the more striking considering the hostility of Australia's climate, marked by scorching heat and long periods of drought and floods.  Bryson's own travels were uneventful in this regard -- the only wildlife he records was a small echidna in a natural park, and only once did the threat of weather stop him. (He had to wait for a flood warning in Queensland to pass before continuing north, an odd experience for me to read given the sweeping floods in Queensland at the moment.)  Despite the lack of drama, there's no shortage of entertainment between Bryson's commentary and the regular misfortunes of travel: at one point Bryson drove three hundred miles into the desert to take in a particularly momentous site, only to realize there were no open hotel rooms in town -- meaning he had to drive three hundred more miles before finding any rest.

Recommended easily if you're interested in Australia or a good laugh.

A Walk in the Woods

A Walk in the Woods
© 1998 Bill Bryson
274 pages

Bill Bryson was so startled to find an entrance to the Appalachian Trail in his backyard that he figured, why not hike it? End to end, it's only a little over two thousand miles of hills, moutains, dense woodlands,  and bear dens.  Nothing a man in his forties can't handle!  As soon as spring arrives, Bryson and his friend Stephen Katz drive to Georgia and start a grueling hike through some of America's wildest country. Neither of them have any idea what they're in for.

This story of two sarcastic middle-aged men bumbling through the woods and mountains is unavoidably entertaining. Bryson prepares himself by reading a book full of grisly bear attacks, and on their first day out Katz decides to start flinging supplies into the woods to lighten his load -- including essentials which doom them to eating soup for weeks on end while they choke on mouthfuls of black flies, attempt to ditch an obnoxious co-hiker who latches on to them, and dodge peril a time or two, all the while ranting and raving enthusiastically.  The two don't attempt the trail all at once, and indeed don't even walk it in full: after realizing they'll never finish in one season, they opt to concentrate on particularly lauded legs of the trail. Though their adventures in the wilderness are entertaining enough, Bryson complements this with running historic and scientific commentary.  I heard of the book when searching for information on Centralia, Pennsylvania, which Bryson visits: a long-running underground coal fire turned the area into a wasteland of collapsed roads and noxious fumes belching from the ground. His descriptions there, as throughout the rest of the book, are evocative.

A Walk in the Woods has whet my appetite for Bryson as a travel guide and humorist; I understand he's recorded his adventures living and hiking in Europe and Australia,  which though I don't have library access to, I hope to read at some point. I've already recommended this to a couple of my hiking friends, and  but even if you've no interest in the outdoors at all, this book is worth your while just for the laughs.

The Mother Tongue

The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way
© 1990 Bill Bryson
270 pages

"More than 350 million people around the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seem, try to."

While I'm reading this as part of a general English-culture theme this week, I would have inevitably picked it up at some point:  language has fascinated me since high school, and I'm forever writing down words and turns of phrase in my journal to look up their derivations at a later point. I know Bill Bryson only through A Short History of Nearly Everything, which I remember favorably even if I don't recall too much about its contents, having read it perhaps five years ago. 

Although I anticipated The Mother Tongue being a history of the English language, it's more than that. Bryson begins with the development of speech and evolution of languages before moving swiftly to Europe to describe the various German, French, Viking, and  Celtic histories that coalesced in the British isles to give rise to a genuine world language,  English. After this initial history, he dedicates separate chapters to the development of words, accents, pronunciations, spelling habits, grammar, names, profanity, and wordplay before tracking English's spread as a world language and contemplating on its future.  

Bryson is an entertaining author, providing humor in bounds. The book only suffers once or twice from long paragraphs of examples, these being exceptions to the general rule of readability. Bryson's information paints a picture of English changing through the ages detailed enough to provide surprises to even a word-nerd like me. I expected that irregularities in spelling would be ironed out by the introduction of the printing press, but I was not aware that many of English's  Latin spellings (in debt and doubt, for instance) were imposed long after the language came into its own by those who wished to ennoble English -- to root it in the old classical tongues and make it something other than 'vulgar'.  Various attempts have been made to make English orthodox, but nothing appears to stop it from steadily growing and assimilating other languages. The Mother Tongue reveals English to have a long, storied history, one that has given its current versatility and humorous contradictions. I' recommend it if you are at all interested in the subject proper, etymology, or Bill Bryon's work in general. 

Related:

• Stories Behind Words : the Origins and Histories of 285 English Words, Peter Limburg
• Words from History, Isaac Asimov
• Words from the Myths, Isaac Asimov. Haven't read either of these two, but considering the author I'll take their usefulness and entertainment value for granted.