#16 Read the Bill Bryson oeuvre

I had never heard of Bill Bryson when the dude's bro sent him two books for Christmas in the mid-to-late-90s: Made in America and Notes from a Small Island. One evening, during my second year-long bout of hives, after the books had rested comfortably on our shelves for a few years, I climbed into the tub with the linguistic history, which had been conveniently located near the study door. I was enraptured. I read it quickly--as you can because, while interesting, the substance is fairly easy--and then picked up Small Island. Like me, Bryson is an American married to a Brit. Like me he finds the country at once familiar and completely incomprehensible. Unlike me, he actually dares to live there. (Oddly enough, he's ended up in the dude's hometown of Durham.)

When I had time, I continued to read Bryson's work, laughing hysterically at his attempt to negotiate the Appalachain Trail (which I used to want to walk when I was a kid) and admiring the haphazard nature of scientific discovery in the part of A Short History I managed to read; apparently it wasn't short enough. But then I stopped reading. Reading on my commute makes me nauseous.

This is the background to putting reading Bryson's work to my list of things to do. And since I went to the library last week and picked up I'm a Stranger Here Myself, Lost Continent, and In a Sunburned Country, I have been reading them.

I really enjoyed Sunburned Country, but first I had to have a crisis of confidence while reading Lost Continent, which I finished on Tuesday, but haven't had time to write about. I took lots of notes, scrupulously, and I will write those up eventually. But I loved Sunburned Country not because I thought it told me all I need it know about Australia, but because it told me anything at all about Australia. The dude and I were trying to think of things we knew about Australia and what we came up with was this: Greg Norman, Crocodile Dundee, and the Crocodile Hunter--the last two made a living selling Australia to Americans, so we're not prepared to go by them. Oh, and Evonne Goolagong. And Bryson's central thesis that we know nothing about Australia is true. We're very bad for neglecting it.

I liked the section about stromatolites best. It reminded me of a trip I had taken to Death Valley and the fascination with which we watched Cyprinodon salinus salinus, Death Valley Pupfish, a fish whose survival is incredibly unlikely. I recognized Bryson's attempt to explain to the American tourist what was so fascinating about stromatolites, as I have often had these conversations with my family. Recently, I was telling Sissy and my cousin about our planned trip to Montana, where we will see unusual things in nature, and was met with much the same response.

Because I haven't written a sublist in a while, here's one--the books in Bryson's oeuvre with the ones I have read marked:

1. The Palace Under the Alps (1985)
2. The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (1989)
3. The Mother Tongue (1990)
4. Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe (1991)
5. Made in America (1994)
6. Notes from a Small Island (1995)
7. A Walk in the Woods (1998)
8. I’m a Stranger Here Myself (1998)
9. In a Sunburned Country (2000)
10. Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words (2002)
11. Bill Bryson’s African Diary (2002)
12. A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)
13. The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (2006)