Among the many thousands of things that I have never been able to understand, one in particular stands out. That is the question of who was the first person who stood by a pile of sand and said, ‘You know, I bet if we took some of this and mixed it with a little potash and heated it, we could make a material that would be solid and yet transparent. We could call it glass.’ Call me obtuse, but you could stand me on a beach till the end of time and never would it occur to me to try to make it into windows.
Notes From a Small Island
Ten years ago, a close friend of mine was working in a bookshop. Understandably, a lot of our conversation turned to recent books and who was worth reading. One recommendation he was very keen to get across to me was for a small paperback called “Tales From a Small Island”. Being, like myself, an English ex-pat living in Australia, the book was a revelation of nostalgia.
Relocating from his hometown of Maine, in the US, to London in 1973, Bill Bryson started out as a journalist for The Times and The Independent. This period has informed much of his writing since. The world of newspaper journalism is a high-paced factory of words, churning out copy to incredibly tight deadlines whilst trying to maintain a certain quality. It was probably his observations of how the language could be used and abused in scenarios like this that prompted some of Bill’s later works.
Bill Bryson :: Essential Works
- The Lost Continent
- Notes From a Small Island
- A Walk in the Woods
- Down Under
- Mother Tongue
- Troublesome Words
- A Short History of Nearly Everything
- The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
- Shakespeare: The World as a Stage
- Notes From a Small Island
On the Road Again
Bryson started to supplement his income with travel articles for the newspapers, but he came to the notice of a wider readership with the publication of ´The Lost Continent´ in 1989, detailing his journey around North America with his mother in a chevy.
The bookshelves are not short of travel journals, but Bryson’s light-hearted style and slightly askew way of looking at familiar things brought a readership as interested in Bryson as they were in the places he visited. The opening quote to this article, from ´Notes From a Small Island, illustrates perfectly the character Bryson brought to the page. This person was not just fascinated by different culture or different food and geography – he was fascinated by everything. Even a description of an average British beach starts with a paragraph more concerned with history, science and philosophy than with the experience of merely being a traveler.
Bryson is inspired by what he sees around him, allowing his writing to go off on tangents of whimsy as his mind wanders. This deep fascination with all details of the world around him would finally get the room to move in his magnum opus – ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’. Released in 2003, this heavy book serves as a near complete answer to the perennial ´Have you ever wondered…´ questions that minds like Bryson’s endure. A body of research that would choke a mammoth, Bryson’s skill is in taking massive chunks of knowledge and facts and conveying them with the same wit and ease of phrase found in all his books. Funny, witty, but at all times informative, Bryson clearly illustrates that writing never needs to be stuffy – even when the subject is steeped in academia. There are many writers who should take a lesson from this.
Broken English
Bryson’s commitment to clear language, providing accessibility to even the densest concepts, has stayed with him since his newspaper days. Sometimes, he tackles the subject straight on. ‘Troublesome Words’ seeks to be a dictionary of the most common mistakes in the English language. There cannot be a writer alive who doesn’t have a blind spot for a particular word or usage, but Bryson has provided a guide to help. Being Bill Bryson, the book is also funny and enlightening, highlighting his corrections and assertions with quotes of genuine published mistakes and literary abuses, most from national newspapers. If you think journalists don’t make schoolboy errors with the Queen’s English, this book will have you wondering how they ever got out of the mailroom. A copy stays on my desk at work and is thumbed through on a regular basis. It has also done service as a perfect book for that littlest room in the house, providing a few quick chuckles when I should have been noticing my daughter didn’t replace the loo roll again.
Bill Bryson :: Links
Bill Bryson is certainly prolific. His best selling memoir of growing up in 1950s America, ‘The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid’, is about to be released in paperback. ‘Troublesome Words’ will gain a companion this month with the publication of ‘Bryson's Dictionary for Writers and Editors’. ‘A Walk in the Woods' is currently being adapted by Bryson into a film for release in 2009 and last year’s biography of Shakespeare, ‘The World as a Stage’, is still selling strong.
