The Road to Little Dribbling

By -
The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain, by Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson's big breakout book was Notes from a Small Island, a funny book about living and traveling in the UK.  That was 20 years ago, so he thought he would do another one and see how things have changed.  For some reason, he drew a line from Bognor Regis to Cape Wrath (the farthest you can go in a straight line while on land), and then of course didn't stick with that line at all, except insofar as he started in Bognor and moved kind of north and eventually got to Cape Wrath--although really, he spent almost no time in Scotland at all, which was pretty disappointing.

Much of the book is fun and enjoyable and lyrical about the beauties of the British countryside and the wonderfulness that is London.  I learned some good stuff for our upcoming trip, like that you can just walk into the West Kennet Long Barrow (this is completely stunning to me, but it turned out that my mom already knew) and that Stonehenge has recently been redone so that there's not so much road right there.  Also he got so excited about the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge that we are definitely going there (I'd already planned to go to Cambridge and wondered if we should go there).  About 65-70% of the book is this nice stuff.

But, then there's the other part.  Really, he complains kind of a lot.  In fact he gets downright tetchy in spots, and while tetchiness is part of life, I'm not sure that all of it had to be included.  And he uses a really surprising amount of profanity, considering that it's a humorous travel book for a general audience.  Those were noticeable problems that made the book less enjoyable than it could have been.

My final objection is more puzzling than anything else.  Bryson spends quite a lot of the book drinking in pubs, which is certainly ordinary enough, but he frequently has one (or three) too many and talks about heading tipsily off to bed.  Then he casually mentions that he suffers from gout.  Well, if you have gout, and you're always talking about how much you love taking long walks, why on earth would you spend nearly every evening sloshing down too much beer??  Honestly, there is a lot of beer drinking and it gets kind of old.

I liked it for the most part, and I picked up some good tips.  But I did think it could have been better written and less grumpy.  You're not that old, Bill, shape up some already.  (Plus your criticisms of H. V. Morton sound like sour grapes.)

Comments

  1. heatherMarch 10, 2016 at 2:53 AM

    I'm glad that you got some useful tips from this one

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousMarch 11, 2016 at 6:05 PM

    I feel this way about all the Bill Bryson books I've read. Whenever I read one of his books, I feel like, sir, if you are unenjoying yourself so much, why do you continue to do this as a job? It makes his books not fun to read.

    ReplyDelete
  3. JoyMarch 12, 2016 at 10:06 AM

    So cool that you're planning a trip to England! Have you read Susan Allen Toth? The books are getting dated, now, but they're much more pleasant to read than Bryson and also give a lot of material for planning a trip.

    Thanks for joining British Isles Friday!

    ReplyDelete
  4. JeanMarch 12, 2016 at 8:07 PM

    Hi Joy, I think I have read one of Toth's books! I think that "Love Affair" book sounds familiar. I will see if the library has any, thanks for the tip!

    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