Bill Bryson
Bill Bryson is an author.
An American who moved to Britain in his twenties and stayed for most of his adult life, Bryson took British citizenship in 2014, with a spell back in the United States between 1995 and 2003. The double residency is not biographical trivia, it is the engine of the travel books. He writes about every country as a fond outsider who has been there long enough to know where the bodies are buried, and the joke almost always lands on him rather than on the locals.
He came out of journalism and the training shows in the sentences, which are short, clean and timed. The early books covered language and American road trips, then Notes from a Small Island turned a farewell tour of Britain into a bestseller that the British seemed to enjoy being insulted by. A Walk in the Woods did the same job on the Appalachian Trail, largely by admitting that the author was unfit, underprepared and frightened.
The pivot came in 2003. A Short History of Nearly Everything is a layman's tour through cosmology, geology, chemistry and biology written by a man with no scientific training, who did the reading and, crucially, kept asking the questions a non-scientist would be too embarrassed to ask. It made him a different kind of writer, and the books that followed on the house, on Shakespeare and on the human body run the same method: choose a subject, read everything, report back with the boring parts removed. He was chancellor of Durham University from 2005 to 2011.
Books (57)
- A short history of nearly everything (2003)
- A Walk in the Woods (1997)
- At Home (2010)
- The Body (2019)
- The Mother Tongue (1656)
- Notes from a small island (1995)
- Neither here nor there (1991)
- One Summer (2013)
- I'm a stranger here myself (1999)
- Shakespeare (2007)
- The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (2006)
- The road to Little Dribbling (2015)
- Made in America (1994)
- A Really Short History of Nearly Everything (2008)
- Prentice Hall Literature -- The American Experience (2010)
- Bill Bryson African Diary (2002)
- Notes from a Big Country (1998)
- Śniadanie z kangurami. Australijskie przygody (2011)
- Seeing Further (2010)
- Icons of England (2010)
- Walk About (2002)
- The Penguin dictionary of troublesome words (1984)
- Una muy breve historia de casi todo (2021)
- The best American travel writing 2016 (2016)
- Pearson Literature--The American Experience, volume one (2015)
- 1927 (2015)
- Adapted Interactive Reader -- Grade 9 (2014)
- Reading Pop Culture (2013)
- Prentice Hall Literature--The American Experience, Volume 1 (2012)
- Prentice Hall Literature - Georgia - The American Experience (2011)
Where to start with Bill Bryson
If you have never read him, Notes from a small island is the fastest way to discover whether the voice works on you. It is a lap of Britain conducted mostly on foot and by bus, alternately affectionate and exasperated, with the comic timing at its most reliable.
A Walk in the Woods is funnier and better structured, because the trail supplies a shape and his walking companion Katz supplies an argument. The Lost Continent is the earliest travel book here and the sharpest-elbowed of them, and the sentimentality he is sometimes accused of is nowhere in it.
Then change lanes. A short history of nearly everything is his best book and the one I would hand to somebody who claims to hate science, a genuinely useful account of how we know what we know. At Home and The Body apply the same trick to a house and to a person. Skip The road to Little Dribbling unless the first Britain book left you wanting more of the same grumbling.
The travel books
The books that made his name, all built on the same trick: a stranger's eye applied to somewhere he knows well enough to be rude about. Notes from a Small Island is the best of them. Down Under is the funniest, and Little Dribbling is the grumpier return twenty years later.
The science and history books
The second career, where he reads everything and explains it without pretending to be an expert. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the most ambitious thing he has done. The Body applies the same method to anatomy, and At Home to the rooms of an English rectory.
The books about language
Bryson spent years as a sub-editor and it shows. The Mother Tongue is enormously entertaining and its etymologies are worth checking before you quote them. The dictionaries are working reference books, and Shakespeare is the short biography that admits how little is known.
The memoirs
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is the childhood memoir and the warmest thing he has written. A Walk in the Woods is nominally travel and actually about friendship and physical decline, which is why it is the one people press on other people.