Bill Bryson

cowboyBuilder

So I've been reading A short history of nearly everything - great read .
I have Down Under in the queue , but love American culture and would love to read one of his others on the USA:

Notes from a big country
Made in America
A walk in the woods
The lost continent


can't think of the others now ..
Any recommendations which is the best ?
Cheers
CBB

Arghus

Ah. Bill. One of my favourite writers. A true master when it comes to combining learning and laugh out loud writing with a readability so flawless it actually disguises how good a writer he truly is. He was one of the very first "grown-up" writers I read when I was a kid. My soft spot for him has persisted ever since.

I think I've read every one of his books, even the tiny books on Shakespeare and his trip to Africa - some of them multiple times. I've felt let down by very few. Perhaps At Home didn't really gel together as a concept, but it was still a good read by most standards. I also found last years The Road to Little Dribbling to be a bit of a disappointment. Actually, that was a bummer of a book. It felt like, on the surface, a bit of a half assed attempt to re-do the whole trip of Britain thing, but it was really a book about a man facing up to the end of middle age and the terrifying prospect of impending death. I'm not making that up - he spends a good portion of the book talking about it. Add to that his persona in that book is even more cantankerous and constantly irritated by the many vagaries of modern life than ever before. I understand that he's always had this curmudgeonly characteristic about him in his travel books, but it often felt exaggerated for comic effect. In the last book it felt real and made me a bit sad. After all these years, as weird as this sounds, I feel like I know Bill a bit - at least I have an image of him in my head and to see him becoming a bit of an old argumentative fart was a bit of a downer. Hopefully he'll get over the hump and produce a few more classics yet.

Anyway, regarding your question about which one of those books you should approach, well, you can't go wrong with any of them. If you love American Culture then I would recommend Made in America. It's not a travel book like some of the others, it deals specifically with the birth of American mass culture and is filled to burst with facts and figures and crazy stories and characters. Great book. The other three you've mentioned all have their charms. A Walk in The Woods is perhaps his funniest book, I'm still amazed they made a movie of it mind you. Notes... is a collection of newspaper articles, you'd have it read in a night. And it would be a good night.

Aside from those you've mentioned. I'd also single out The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid his memoir of growing up in Des Moines during the fifties and sixties, another hilarious read. Another specifically American focused book is One Summer: America, 1927. Exactly what it says on the tin: a book about America during the summer of 1927. He has some reasoning about why that year and that year alone is worth a whole book, not sure I totally believe him, but what of it. It's another totally absorbing read filled with absolutely daft stories from the time. I will warn you though, I hope you like baseball; because Bill loves baseball and at least a third of that book is filled with stories about batting averages and run percentages during the Summer of '27. Under normal circumstances, there are few things I could possibly care less about than baseball. It's a testament to his skill as a writer that I found myself almost caring in that instance.

Arsemageddon

I'd second the recommendation for Made in America - it's both informative and very, very funny.

cowboyBuilder

Thanks guys !

2 are winging their way from amazon to me now !!

Made in America & Notes from a big country

Can't wait

Wailin

Would highly recommend A Walk in the Woods also, very entertaining. Have read most of them and this was by far my favourite.

HeidiHeidi

A Walk in the Woods was the first one of his I ever read (based on an excerpt I read in the Reader's Digest as a kid), and is still one of my absolute favourites.

I'm delighted to see a few titles mentioned here that I didn't know about - I thought I'd read them all! - I'm going on a long, long trip soon that will involved a LOT of reading - I'll be searching Amazon to load up the Kindle!

fjon

I'd say maybe don't read Notes from a Big Country in one go. Each chapter is different and they're all short. Leave it in your bathroom and read a chapter on the toilet rather than looking at your phone