Week 7: At Home

By -

At Home: a Short History of Private Life, by Bill Bryson

I've been looking forward to getting my hands on Bryson's new book, which is a sort of mish-mashy history of homes, comfort, and private life in general. It didn't disappoint me; although you can't trust him to be exactly accurate on every point, Bryson never fails to entertain and do some informing as well. His trademark style is pleasant to read and abounds in descriptive adverbs that add humor and interest. (Though I did feel that he used grimly an awful lot this time around.) Some of his favorites are cherishably, staggeringly, alluringly, and curiously.

Bryson's general plan is to wander through his Norfolk house--a former rectory--room by room, and write about topics that are generally connected with what the room is for. So in the dressing room, he talks about the cotton trade and corsets. The study, which is sometimes invaded, gets a long and horrifying discourse on mice, rats, and other critters, and the bathroom chapter features plenty of enthralling information about London sewers.

The house was built in 1851, the same year as the Great Exhibition, and that gets plenty of play, as well as anything else that happened in that eventful year. Although Bryson talks about homes in many periods of history, and wanders over to America at times, England in the Victorian era gets the most space, with the Georgians coming in second because they loved architecture so much. There's plenty to talk about, and it's a fun book.

The main result of reading it is to make you very, very grateful for your nice comfy bed, your central heating and modern plumbing, and your general lack of coal fires, arsenic-soaked wallpaper, and cholera plagues.

Comments

  1. TrishFebruary 14, 2011 at 5:40 AM

    Bill Bryson is good, isn't he? I thoroughly enjoyed this book as well.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more