gjoe 's review for:

Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson

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A mostly delightful, highly neurotic trip down Nostalgia Lane! Hard to pin down exactly what he’s nostalgic for at times. Every British town is “the same set of cards reshuffled,” but if any of them commits the crime of putting up building after about 1910, they’re destroying history. Bryson laments the postwar socialism that was already fading when he moved to the UK in the ‘70s while also romanticizing a sort of ill-defined Victorian industrialist fantasy, with Factories that used to Make Things. Has Britain lost something it can never get back, or does it have a unique and undying character that will always charm Americans in cargo shorts? In 1997, I guess the answer was both! In 2023, this is a mostly pleasant, sometimes very funny little time capsule of a travelogue. An ideal airport bookstore paperback.