Bill Bryson

Ok, for years I never bothered about Bill Bryson and thought of him simply as a travel writer getting in on the world wide interest in travelling. It was only after my wife started reading his books and wouldto be sitting on the couch chuckling, that I started to have a second look. It was only then that I started to understand something of the world wide phenomemon that is Bill Bryson.

Even so, I was not really interested in reading his travel books, but I did want to read 'A Walk in the Woods', given that I am a keen walker myself.

A Walk in the Woods (1998)

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail was my first Bill Bryson book, read in July 2017. It was the first time I had been exposed to his quirky writing. The premise is a simple one

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail is a 1998 autobiographical book by travel writer Bill Bryson, describing his attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail with his friend "Stephen Katz". The book is written in a humorous style, interspersed with more serious discussions of matters relating to the trail's history, and the surrounding sociology, ecology, trees, plants, animals and people.

His wit is to the fore. It is much more than a travelogue, so I was surprised to read the number of critical reviews on Booktopia. For me, it was a 9 out of 10. And it finishes on a wonderfully positive note. The experience was a good one for him.

I followed it up with a viewing of the 2015 film of the same name, starring Robert Redford and Nick Nolte. A fantastic film and very true to the book. Definitely worth a watch.

A Short History of Nearly Everything (2010)

A Short History of Nearly Everything is Bryson's quest to understand everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization- how we got from there, being nothing at all, to here, being us.Bill Bryson's challenge is to take subjects that normally bore the pants off most of us, like geology, chemistry and particle physics, and see if there isn't some way to render them comprehensible to people who have never thought they could be interested in science. 

I read this in July 2018 and got through it really quickly. Much of the physics I knew, but the chemistry and geology parts were a fascinating extension to my existing knowledge. Definitely 10 out of 10.

The blurb says in part

It's not so much about what we know, as how we know what we know. How do we know what is in the centre of the earth, or what a black hole is, or where the continents were 600 million years ago? How did anyone ever figure these things out?On his travels through time and space he encounters a splendid collection of astonishingly eccentric, competitive, obsessive and foolish scientists, such as the painfully shy Henry Cavendish, who worked out important conundrums including how much the earthweighed, but failed to report many of his findings. In the company of such extraordinary people, Bill Bryson takes us with him on the ultimate eye- opening journey, and reveals the world in a way most of us have never seen it before. 

He says in the book that he set aside 3 years to fully investigate this topic and I can believe it. The depth of knowledge is fantastic. Yet it is all written in such an easy to read manner, filled with the quirkiness of the main players. Sadly, it finishes on a very sombre note but I will let you get to that point for yourself.

This book won the Royal Society's Aventis Prize as well as the Descartes Prize, the European Union's highest literary award. Wow!

And he, he is no mug. Although he was born in the American Midwest, he now lives in the UK and has won the Royal Society's Aventis Prize as well as the Descartes Prize, the European Union's highest literary award. 

There are obviously many more Bill Bryson books to read.

The Body: A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson

Bryson's latest book, published in October 2019, hit the shelves just in time for Christmas and was on my list. It comes in at 450 pages in hardcopy format and was a wonderful read. First to the blurb:

In the bestselling, prize-winning A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson achieved the seemingly impossible by making the science of our world both understandable and entertaining to millions of people around the globe.
Now he turns his attention inwards to explore the human body, how it functions and its remarkable ability to heal itself. Full of extraordinary facts and astonishing stories, The Body: A Guide for Occupants is a brilliant, often very funny attempt to understand the miracle of our physical and neurological make up.
A wonderful successor to A Short History of Nearly Everything, this book will have you marvelling at the form you occupy, and celebrating the genius of your existence, time and time again.

He logically works his way through the body, organ by organ, area by area. The contents shows his approach.

I studied human physiology at Uni in the early 1970s and found the book both a wonderful refresher and a superb analysis of what we have learnt since then. His eye for detail, so evident in A Short History of Nearly Everything, is to the fore again in this book. Every chapter is full of interesting anecdotes and factoids, yet time and time again, he confides that we don't really know why this bit does what it does. Our body is still a mystery to us, in its complexity and its diversity. Yet it works superbly right from day 1, and continues to work for years and years, self-diagnosing and fixing itself time and time again.

Anyone can read this book, children included, and all will find many wonderful things of interest. Like all the other Bill Bryson books I have read, it is 5/5.