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3.54 AVERAGE
3.54 AVERAGE
Yet another laugh-out-loud addition to my Bryson shelf: sometimes sharply pointed, usually quite thoughtful and always hilarious.
This one kind of broke my heart a little.
Bill Bryson is a master of the English language. He wields it not as a sword in fiery rhetoric, and not as a scalpel in poetry. He uses it as a hug with some light tickling.
Reading his books is an exercise in warm, comfortable conversation with someone who likes and admires you. He complains, he trips, he discovers fascinating things and people, and you're there for all of it.
None of that has changed.
But poor old beleaguered Bill is now an actual old man who: goes into an electronics shop and is astonished by Bose headphones, is outraged by the cost of a sandwich, has to sit in traffic, thinks television shows are pretty bad, it goes on. It's nothing more than his complaints and idle musings. They're done with charm, but no real interest.
It feels like it was dictated from his daily muttering.
Every great athlete stays one season too long before they accept it's over. Time to raise the jersey, Bryson.
Bill Bryson is a master of the English language. He wields it not as a sword in fiery rhetoric, and not as a scalpel in poetry. He uses it as a hug with some light tickling.
Reading his books is an exercise in warm, comfortable conversation with someone who likes and admires you. He complains, he trips, he discovers fascinating things and people, and you're there for all of it.
None of that has changed.
But poor old beleaguered Bill is now an actual old man who: goes into an electronics shop and is astonished by Bose headphones, is outraged by the cost of a sandwich, has to sit in traffic, thinks television shows are pretty bad, it goes on. It's nothing more than his complaints and idle musings. They're done with charm, but no real interest.
It feels like it was dictated from his daily muttering.
Every great athlete stays one season too long before they accept it's over. Time to raise the jersey, Bryson.
I'm always happy to see Bill Bryson has written a new book, as [b:A Short History of Nearly Everything|21|A Short History of Nearly Everything|Bill Bryson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1433086293s/21.jpg|2305997] and [b:The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid|10538|The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid|Bill Bryson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1389761724s/10538.jpg|2252299] are two of my all-time favorites. The Road to Little Dribbling is one of his travelogues, in which he walks, drives, buses, and ferries around England, amusing and informing his readers with his observations. Other readers have felt that some of these observations are the rantings of a grumpy old man, but I found many of them both laugh out loud and honest. For all his crotchety opinions, he provides at least as many judgments about how truly beautiful Britain is and the things they have done right.
My only real disappointment is that I read this as a "real" book and listened to it as an audiobook, but the audio was very sadly not narrated by Bill Bryson himself. He has a marvelous voice, which I think would have only made this good book better.
There is something about the pace and scale of British life - an appreciation of small pleasures, a kind of restraint with respect to greed, generally speaking - that makes life strangely agreeable. The British really are the only people in the world who become genuinely enlivened when presented with a hot beverage and a small plain biscuit.
My only real disappointment is that I read this as a "real" book and listened to it as an audiobook, but the audio was very sadly not narrated by Bill Bryson himself. He has a marvelous voice, which I think would have only made this good book better.
In the seventh chapter of The Road to Little Dribbling, author Bill Bryson introduces us to one of his friends, a retired travel editor named John Flinn, by writing that he "loves baseball and shares with me an abiding admiration for the fashion model Cheryl Tiegs as she was forty years ago and, in our memories, will always be." This lone statement--meant, I suppose, as a cheeky commentary on the author's age and overall temperament--is in fact the perfect distillation of everything that is wrong with Bryson's most recent book in one sentence, as he uses much of the travelogue's 375-page run to point out everything about British society, culture, and topography that has changed since the publication of his last memoir about Great Britain, Notes from a Small Island, twenty years ago.
Granted, nostalgia can be a worthwhile topic to explore, as long as the author is cognizant of the silliness behind his or her own feelings, which Bryson frequently claims to be. (And were Bryson writing this in the same style as his other books, there would be little reason to worry. After all, Bryson is one of the few writers who can offer biting criticisms that also come off as exceedingly reasonable and erudite.) But there are more than a few moments--when he finds himself engrossed in a tabloid, for example, or speaking with service workers, or criticizing the British government--when Bryson's frustrations with the changed world around him compel him to let loose with obscenities, invectives, and fantasies of violence, all of which are delivered to the reader without a hint of irony or self-awareness. (This is in contrast to some of Bryson's other books, such as A Walk in the Woods, in which the author depicted himself as cross between intrepid explorer and bumbling old fool, albeit one with an impressively bookish understanding of the world, and delivered his criticisms of people and places with a warm, dry wit.) As we flip from one page to the next--and as Bryson journeys from one location to the next--he punctuates his story with the cynicism and humorlessness of a man who believes he can better connect with an audience through negativity, all the while dismissing such behavior as an inevitability of age. (At 63 he's now considered a senior citizen, a fact he continually presents as though it explains away everything.)
What's especially troublesome is that, in writing about his dejection in the face of a country with which he is suddenly unfamiliar, Bryson's nostalgia is competing against others who, at the same time, are seeing Great Britain in the way Bryson once did. They are young, perhaps the same age as Bryson when he first set out twenty years ago, and they are stopping and seeing the unique, unheralded places that rest beyond the major highways for the very first time. They don't see their country as something to be compared against a mental scrapbook; they see it as Bryson himself once did and still wants to...which, in a way, makes this book not only immediately outdated but also in many ways unnecessary.
That's not to say there aren't moments in which we see the old Bryson return to us. In fact, his grating negativity is mostly consigned to the book's first hundred pages; once they have passed, and Bryson is fully engaged in his journey, he becomes more and more tolerable, until the book begins to read like it should. Bryson offers us historical backstories or short, biographical anecdotes about important people, such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Alexander Keiller, Herbert Ponting, Roger Bannister, Lawrence Bragg, and Basil Brown, among others. (His account of Michael Ventris, which occupies a single paragraph, is simple, straightforward, and entirely heartbreaking.) Without pause, these moments transport us back to the books that made us adore Bryson in the first place--in my case, A Short History of Nearly Everything, followed by A Walk in the Woods and, eventually, At Home and One Summer. But those moments are rare, often interrupted by descriptions of the land--which are not half bad at times--or more of Bryson's complaints.
In pining for Bryson to tell us more of these stories rather than more of his desire for the way things used to be, the reader becomes Bryson himself: upset that so much has changed so suddenly, that what lies before us is not what we're familiar with or what we expect. (Those moments when Bryson becomes the befuddling yet knowledgeable traveller with whom we are accustomed serve only to remind us of exactly what we're missing out on when those moments end.) Unintentionally, Bryson's sour attitude offers us the best insight into exactly how he feels as he crosses his new home country, except that our nostalgia is for a man rather than an island.
A few pages after introducing us to John Flinn and sharing their affection for a more youthful Cheryl Tiegs, Bryson finds himself sitting in his hotel room watching television...or at least attempting to. As it happens, British television has little to offer our author, and he settles on a nonfiction program--a travelogue, as it happens, in which a former government official "with a taste for annoyingly colorful suits" rides trains across the country:
In moments such as these, one wonders if Bryson isn't making us the target of an elaborate satire, almost like performance art in book form. Surely, we wonder, no one could lack such self-awareness--to bemoan the vacuity of television while simultaneously finding that same vacuity important enough to note in a book...and not just any book, but one in which an older man travels across the county to discover that something that once used to be there is no longer there. Except, in the end, we discover that we are the same. We undertake a journey, only to discover, much to our genuine disappointment, that the man who had once been there may no longer be there anymore.
This review was originally published at There Will Be Books Galore.
Granted, nostalgia can be a worthwhile topic to explore, as long as the author is cognizant of the silliness behind his or her own feelings, which Bryson frequently claims to be. (And were Bryson writing this in the same style as his other books, there would be little reason to worry. After all, Bryson is one of the few writers who can offer biting criticisms that also come off as exceedingly reasonable and erudite.) But there are more than a few moments--when he finds himself engrossed in a tabloid, for example, or speaking with service workers, or criticizing the British government--when Bryson's frustrations with the changed world around him compel him to let loose with obscenities, invectives, and fantasies of violence, all of which are delivered to the reader without a hint of irony or self-awareness. (This is in contrast to some of Bryson's other books, such as A Walk in the Woods, in which the author depicted himself as cross between intrepid explorer and bumbling old fool, albeit one with an impressively bookish understanding of the world, and delivered his criticisms of people and places with a warm, dry wit.) As we flip from one page to the next--and as Bryson journeys from one location to the next--he punctuates his story with the cynicism and humorlessness of a man who believes he can better connect with an audience through negativity, all the while dismissing such behavior as an inevitability of age. (At 63 he's now considered a senior citizen, a fact he continually presents as though it explains away everything.)
What's especially troublesome is that, in writing about his dejection in the face of a country with which he is suddenly unfamiliar, Bryson's nostalgia is competing against others who, at the same time, are seeing Great Britain in the way Bryson once did. They are young, perhaps the same age as Bryson when he first set out twenty years ago, and they are stopping and seeing the unique, unheralded places that rest beyond the major highways for the very first time. They don't see their country as something to be compared against a mental scrapbook; they see it as Bryson himself once did and still wants to...which, in a way, makes this book not only immediately outdated but also in many ways unnecessary.
That's not to say there aren't moments in which we see the old Bryson return to us. In fact, his grating negativity is mostly consigned to the book's first hundred pages; once they have passed, and Bryson is fully engaged in his journey, he becomes more and more tolerable, until the book begins to read like it should. Bryson offers us historical backstories or short, biographical anecdotes about important people, such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Alexander Keiller, Herbert Ponting, Roger Bannister, Lawrence Bragg, and Basil Brown, among others. (His account of Michael Ventris, which occupies a single paragraph, is simple, straightforward, and entirely heartbreaking.) Without pause, these moments transport us back to the books that made us adore Bryson in the first place--in my case, A Short History of Nearly Everything, followed by A Walk in the Woods and, eventually, At Home and One Summer. But those moments are rare, often interrupted by descriptions of the land--which are not half bad at times--or more of Bryson's complaints.
In pining for Bryson to tell us more of these stories rather than more of his desire for the way things used to be, the reader becomes Bryson himself: upset that so much has changed so suddenly, that what lies before us is not what we're familiar with or what we expect. (Those moments when Bryson becomes the befuddling yet knowledgeable traveller with whom we are accustomed serve only to remind us of exactly what we're missing out on when those moments end.) Unintentionally, Bryson's sour attitude offers us the best insight into exactly how he feels as he crosses his new home country, except that our nostalgia is for a man rather than an island.
A few pages after introducing us to John Flinn and sharing their affection for a more youthful Cheryl Tiegs, Bryson finds himself sitting in his hotel room watching television...or at least attempting to. As it happens, British television has little to offer our author, and he settles on a nonfiction program--a travelogue, as it happens, in which a former government official "with a taste for annoyingly colorful suits" rides trains across the country:
Occasionally he would get off the train and spend approximately forty seconds with a local historian who would explain to him why something that used to be there is no longer there.
"So this used to be the site of the biggest prosthetics mill in Lancashire?" Michael would say.
"That's right. Fourteen thousand girls worked here in its heyday."
"Gosh. And now it's this giant supermarket?"
"That's right."
"Gosh. That's progress for you. Well, I'm off to Oldham to see where they used to make sheep dip. Ta-ta."
And this really was the best thing on.
In moments such as these, one wonders if Bryson isn't making us the target of an elaborate satire, almost like performance art in book form. Surely, we wonder, no one could lack such self-awareness--to bemoan the vacuity of television while simultaneously finding that same vacuity important enough to note in a book...and not just any book, but one in which an older man travels across the county to discover that something that once used to be there is no longer there. Except, in the end, we discover that we are the same. We undertake a journey, only to discover, much to our genuine disappointment, that the man who had once been there may no longer be there anymore.
This review was originally published at There Will Be Books Galore.
Quién me iba a decir a mí que Bryson merecería algo por debajo de cinco estrellas. Conocí a Bryson gracias a su En las antípodas, que en su momento me pareció el mejor libro de viajes que había leído. Siguieron unos cuantos más, como Notes from a small island, que escribió como despedida a su país de adopción tras veinte años viviendo en UK antes de mudarse a EE.UU., o su continuación, Notes from a big country, sus impresiones en forma de columnas semanales sobre los EE.UU. tras pasarse veinte años fuera viviendo en UK. Su paseo por los Apalaches, A walk in the woods, mezclaba las anécdotas más absurdas e hilarantes con algunos pensamientos de altura, mientras se hacía unos miles de kilómetros a pie por el centro de los EE.UU. Cuando le dio por dejar de escribir libros de viajes y pasarse a la no ficción, lo petó fuertemente con A short history of nearly everything, que es un libro de ciencia maravilloso, con sus cositas, pero que puede atraer a muchísima gente a la ciencia.
En fin, que parecía que todo lo hacía bien, el querido Bill. Y al legar a este libro: DESILUSIÓN. Resulta que la mitad del libro son quejas acerca de que las cosas ya no son como antes, que antes eran mejores y ahora son peores. Sin atisbo de ironía. Tal cual.
Añádase a sus cavilaciones llenas de gruñidos algo de racismo y xenofobia (me gustaría un país que tuviera un banco llamado Britannia y no uno que se llama como una ciudad española con un 40% de paro juvenil), unos cuantos comentarios proBrexit rayanos en la deshumanización de todo lo que no sea británico, riéguese el libro abundantemente con ello y háblese mucho, pero mucho, de tomar una taza de café y ver escaparates en todos los pueblos que se visitan. También habla mucho de museos, y por supuesto cuenta anécdotas graciosas (cuando la valla del parking me golpeó en la cabeza el impacto fue tal que conseguí golpearme la cara con los codos). Y en general escribe maravillosamente bien, el amigo Bryson. Pero en este libro me he dado cuenta de que todos los rasgos que he detestado ya estaban en sus libros anteriores, y yo no los veía. Ya ahora me temo que no puedo dejar de verlos.
Y eso que, reconozcámoslo, el libro está maravillosamente montado desde el principio. Comienza con el autor estudiando los tests de ciudadanía porque, por fina, va a ser nombrado ciudadano británico pero claro, hay un montón de exámenes sobre vida en UK y cultura británica que tiene que aprobar. Y va dando ejemplos de preguntas que le pueden caer, algunas obscuras y otras, por supuesto, incorrectas. Como la de cuál es la distancia más larga dentro de la isla de Gran Bretaña. Sabe que en examen tiene que responder u na cosa, pero luego al llegar a casa se pone a comprobar cuál es de verdad la distancia más larga dentro de Gran Bretaña, y decide basar un viaje sobre esta línea, inmodestamente bautizada como la Bryson line.
El autor aprovecha el libro para vengarse de gente, increíble lo picajoso y pejiguero que puede llegar a ser. Nombra restaurantes y dueños con nombre y apellidos para quejarse, y cosas así, que me parecen fuera de límites.
Escocia se la ventila en un capítulo, mientras que el sur de Inglaterra tiene 14 o 15. Eso puede estar mejor o peor según quien lea, pero sí es cierto que de las Highlands aprendemos menos que de Bognor Regis, con el que empieza el viaje.
En resumen (del resumen), que Bryson sigue escribiendo como los ángeles, pero que hace demasiadas paradas para quejarse de cosas, algunas de ellas de manera bastante racista y clasista, en este libro. Por lo demás, es un libro de viajes al estilo Bryson, que proporcionará muchos momentos de sonrisas y de alzamiento de cejas ante datos curiosos.
En fin, que parecía que todo lo hacía bien, el querido Bill. Y al legar a este libro: DESILUSIÓN. Resulta que la mitad del libro son quejas acerca de que las cosas ya no son como antes, que antes eran mejores y ahora son peores. Sin atisbo de ironía. Tal cual.
Añádase a sus cavilaciones llenas de gruñidos algo de racismo y xenofobia (me gustaría un país que tuviera un banco llamado Britannia y no uno que se llama como una ciudad española con un 40% de paro juvenil), unos cuantos comentarios proBrexit rayanos en la deshumanización de todo lo que no sea británico, riéguese el libro abundantemente con ello y háblese mucho, pero mucho, de tomar una taza de café y ver escaparates en todos los pueblos que se visitan. También habla mucho de museos, y por supuesto cuenta anécdotas graciosas (cuando la valla del parking me golpeó en la cabeza el impacto fue tal que conseguí golpearme la cara con los codos). Y en general escribe maravillosamente bien, el amigo Bryson. Pero en este libro me he dado cuenta de que todos los rasgos que he detestado ya estaban en sus libros anteriores, y yo no los veía. Ya ahora me temo que no puedo dejar de verlos.
Y eso que, reconozcámoslo, el libro está maravillosamente montado desde el principio. Comienza con el autor estudiando los tests de ciudadanía porque, por fina, va a ser nombrado ciudadano británico pero claro, hay un montón de exámenes sobre vida en UK y cultura británica que tiene que aprobar. Y va dando ejemplos de preguntas que le pueden caer, algunas obscuras y otras, por supuesto, incorrectas. Como la de cuál es la distancia más larga dentro de la isla de Gran Bretaña. Sabe que en examen tiene que responder u na cosa, pero luego al llegar a casa se pone a comprobar cuál es de verdad la distancia más larga dentro de Gran Bretaña, y decide basar un viaje sobre esta línea, inmodestamente bautizada como la Bryson line.
Later that afternoon, at home, I pulled out my ancient and falling-apart AA Complete Atlas of Britain just to have a look. Apart from anything else I was curious to see what is the longest distance you can travel in Britain in a straight line. It is most assuredly not from Land’s End to John o’Groats, despite what my official study guide had said. (What it said, for the record, is: “The longest distance on the mainland is from John o’Groats on the north coast of Scotland to Land’s End in the southwest corner of England. It is about 870 miles.”) For one thing, the northernmost outcrop of mainland is not John o’Groats but Dunnet Head, eight miles to the west, and at least six other nubbins of land along that same stretch of coastline are more northerly than John o’Groats. But the real issue is that a journey from Land’s End to John o’Groats would require a series of zigzags to overcome Britain’s irregular shape. If you allow zigzags, then you could carom about the country in any pattern you wished and thus make the distance effectively infinite. I wanted to know what was the farthest you could travel in a straight line without crossing salt water. Laying a ruler across the page, I discovered to my surprise that the ruler tilted away from Land’s End and John o’Groats, like a deflected compass needle. The longest straight line actually started at the top left-hand side of the map at a lonely Scottish promontory called Cape Wrath. The bottom, even more interestingly, went straight through Bognor Regis.
Larry was right. It was a sign.
For the briefest of periods, I considered the possibility of traveling through Britain along my newly discovered line (the Bryson Line, as I would like it now to become generally known, since I was the one who discovered it), but I could see almost at once that that wouldn’t be practical or even desirable. It would mean, if I took it literally, going through people’s houses and yards, tramping across trackless fields, and fording rivers, which was clearly crazy; and if I just tried to stay close to it, it would mean endlessly picking my way through suburban streets in places like Macclesfield and Wolverhampton, which didn’t sound terribly rewarding either. But I could certainly use the Bryson Line as a kind of beacon, to guide my way. I determined that I would begin and end at its terminal points, and visit it from time to time en route when I conveniently could and when I remembered to do so, but I wouldn’t force myself to follow it religiously. It would be, rather, my terminus ad quem, whatever exactly that means. Along the way, I would, as far as possible, avoid the places I went on the first trip (too much danger of standing on a corner and harrumphing at how things had deteriorated since I was last there) and instead focus on places I had never been, in the hope I could see them with fresh, unbiased eyes.
I particularly liked the idea of Cape Wrath. I know nothing about it—it could be a caravan park, for all I know—but it sounded rugged and wave-battered and difficult to get to, a destination for a serious traveler. 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 replying, “Gosh, that’s a long way.” I would nod in grim acknowledgment. “Not even sure if there’s a tearoom,” I would add.
But before that distant adventure, I had hundreds of miles of historic towns and lovely countryside to get through, and a visit to the celebrated English seaside at Bognor.
El autor aprovecha el libro para vengarse de gente, increíble lo picajoso y pejiguero que puede llegar a ser. Nombra restaurantes y dueños con nombre y apellidos para quejarse, y cosas así, que me parecen fuera de límites.
Escocia se la ventila en un capítulo, mientras que el sur de Inglaterra tiene 14 o 15. Eso puede estar mejor o peor según quien lea, pero sí es cierto que de las Highlands aprendemos menos que de Bognor Regis, con el que empieza el viaje.
En resumen (del resumen), que Bryson sigue escribiendo como los ángeles, pero que hace demasiadas paradas para quejarse de cosas, algunas de ellas de manera bastante racista y clasista, en este libro. Por lo demás, es un libro de viajes al estilo Bryson, que proporcionará muchos momentos de sonrisas y de alzamiento de cejas ante datos curiosos.
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
I still think Bill Bryson fancies himself to be at least 50% more funny and clever than he really is, but I found myself enjoying this, even more than "Sunburned."
4.5 - someday GR will come to its senses and allow half stars.
4.5 - someday GR will come to its senses and allow half stars.
funny
lighthearted
fast-paced
While enjoyable, it's not nearly as funny as his other books, and a lot of it felt like a grumpy old man complaining that things aren't exactly the same as they were 40 years ago. But as an American living in the UK, there were a lot of things I identified with.