"At Home"

by Bill Bryson

This book was not at all what I expected... However, knowing what Bryson is like, it is exactly what I should have expected it to be.
I thought that it was going to be a room by room exploration of his house, an old rectory, in Norfolk. How that could fill 536 pages did puzzle me a bit and so I gave it a try when Jean brought it home from the library.

It really has little to do with that house but instead is a fascinating, almost stream of consciousness, ramble through the factoids that he collects when doing his research... which must be almost all of his waking hours.
Reading the book can best be compared to surfing the internet, but doing it very well and encountering only things that are fascinating.
We all know about Charles Darwin... but how many of us know that he spent eight years on the manuscript of a treatise on barnacles? Then he spent another three years producing a 684-page study of barnacles and a companion work on fossil barnacles...
The beauty of this information is that it prepares us for the punchline that Bryson had in waiting. Upon the conclusion of the work, Darwin said: "I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before."
Great!

One of the great beauties of the book is that it can be picked up and read at any time whether you have minutes or hours to spend with it. It can be put aside for days and then opened at the bookmark and off you go yet again.

It brought me great pleasure ...

Reviewed by David Nale

"A Short History Of Nearly Everything"

by Bryson, Bill

If you don't know a quark from a quasar, you will still understand and love this text. It addresses the most complicated scientific phenomenon and teaches it in comprehensible and often comical analogies. Applied learning theory at it's best. An extremely well-written page-turner.

Review by Nan Sevic

"A Walk in the Woods"

by Bill Bryson

It falls far short of Steinbeck's "Travels with Charley", but it has many similarities and is good reading in that it is very funny in places and thought-provoking in others.
Bryson became fascinated with walking the 2,200 mile Appalachian Trail and the book is a chronicle of his attempt to walk it, much of it in the company of one of the most irritating characters you will ever encounter in a book. Why Bryson did not kill him is one of the enduring puzzles of the universe. Charley was a much better companion.
All the usual ingredients you have come to expect from Bryson are in the book: funny anecdotes, introspection, well observed characters, analysis of a way of life and endless statistics.
Not his best, but worth the time spent in reading it.

Review by David Nale

"Thunderbolt Kid"

by Bill Bryson

Actually, the full title is "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid", but who is ever going to call it that?
This was a gift and although I appreciated the sentiment, I did not expect to enjoy it much. I figured that it would be more than I wanted to know about Bryson's Iowa childhood.
I was wrong!
It turned out to be a fascinating read in that it was not just about him, but also about America in the 1950s and thus about the lives of those of us who were young in the 50s.
Perhaps giving a short passage will illustrate this: "The last stop in every shopping trip was a corner grocer's called Benteco's, where they had a screen door that kerboinged and bammed in a deeply satisfying manner, and made every entrance a kind of occasion. At Benteco's I was always allowed to select two bottles of NeHi brand pop – one for dinner, one for afterwards when we were playing cards or watching Bilko or Jack Benny on TV. NeHi was the pop of small towns – I don't know why – and it had the intensest flavour and most vivid colours of any products yet cleared by the Food and Drugs Administration for human consumption. It came in six select flavours – grape, strawberry, orange, cherry, lime-lemon (never "lemon-lime") and root beer – but each was so potently flavourful that it made you eyes water like an untended sprinkler, and so sharply carbonated that it was like swallowing a thousand tiny razor blades. It was wonderful."

Reviewed by David Nale