10*[(bitch)+(bitch)+(bitch)+(joke that almost makes it all worth it)]

Apparently there's an earlier audiobook version of this recorded by Bryson himself, which I would love to get my hands on somewhere, because I've enjoyed his low-key reading on several of his other books. Unfortunately, this version narrated by William Roberts quickly became unlistenable. I just barely managed to get through the first CD, but by then was pretty much ready to drive into a brick wall. Roberts overacts shamelessly and relentlessly, sounding like a character from some 1940's radio comedy like Fibber McGee & Molly, or else the guy who let's you know that Fibber is "brought to you by Chesterfields, the cigarette smoked by more doctors than any other." At times he even chuckles gently at "his" (i.e., Bryson's) own cleverness...nyyaarrRRRGGH !!

That said, Bryson remains a highly skilled and amusing writer. I particularly enjoyed his very first piece on returning to America after living 20 years in England, since his experiences readjusting to the land of his youth reminded me so much of my own return to the States after 15 years in Taiwan - he just tells it so much better than I ever could. But from there on, he sounds increasingly like the bastard child or Garrison Keillor and Jerry Seinfeld during his observational "what's the deal with...?" period, as he riffs on more mundane topics like airports, basements, garbage disposals and the like.

This could well be a 5-star book, but with this 1-star narration I couldn't give it more than an overall 3-star average. However, I will definitely look for it in either print or Bryson-read formats and hopefully give it the review - and rating - it truly deserves.

My boy Billy B. NEVER disappoints! 10/10. 4/5 stars!

Started out very charming, but started to get old. Some kindle highlights:

It is disconcerting to find yourself so simultaneously in your element and out of it. I can enumerate all manner of minutiae that mark me out as an American—which of the fifty states has a unicameral legislature, what a squeeze play is in baseball, who played Captain Kangaroo on TV. I even know about two-thirds of the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which is more than some people know who have sung it publicly. But send me to the hardware store and even now I am totally lost. For months I had conversations with the clerk at our local True-Value that went something like this: “Hi. I need some of that goopy stuff you fill nail holes in walls with. My wife’s people call it Pollyfilla.” “Ah, you mean spackle.” “Very possibly. - location 122


The many good things about America also took on a bewitching air of novelty. I was as dazzled as any newcomer by the famous ease and convenience of daily life, the giddying abundance of absolutely everything, the boundless friendliness of strangers, the wondrous unfillable vastness of an American basement, the delight of encountering waitresses and other service providers who actually seemed to enjoy their work, the curiously giddying notion that ice is not a luxury item and that rooms can have more than one electrical socket. As well, there has been the constant, unexpected joy of reencountering all those things I grew up with but had largely forgotten: baseball on the radio, the deeply satisfying whoingbang slam of a screen door in summer, insects that glow, sudden run-for-your-life thunderstorms, really big snowfalls, Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July, the smell of a skunk from just the distance that you have to sniff the air quizzically and say: “Is that a skunk?”, Jell-O with stuff in it, the pleasingly comical sight of oneself in shorts. All that counts for a lot, in a strange way. - location 140


“We don’t do Thousand Island,” she says flatly. I can’t possibly ask her to recite the list again, so I ask for the only one I can remember, which I am able to remember only because it sounded so awful—Gruyère and goat’s milk vinaigrette or something. Lately I have hit on the expedient of saying: “I’ll have whichever one is pink and doesn’t smell like the bottom of a gym bag.” They can usually relate to that, I find. - location 279


In fancy restaurants it is even worse because the server has to take you through the evening’s specials, which are described with a sumptuousness and panache that are seldom less than breathtaking and always incomprehensible. My wife and I went to a fancy restaurant in Vermont for our anniversary the other week and I swear I didn’t understand a single thing the waiter described to us. “Tonight,” he began with enthusiasm, “we have a crêpe galette of sea chortle and kelp in a rich mal de mer sauce, seasoned with disheveled herbs grown in our own herbarium. This is baked in an inverted Prussian helmet for seventeen minutes and four seconds precisely, then layered with steamed wattle and woozle leaves. Very delicious; very audacious. We are also offering this evening a double rack of Rio Ròcho cutlets, tenderized at your table by our own flamenco dancers, then baked in a clay dong for twenty-seven minutes under a lattice of guava peel and sun-ripened stucco. For vegetarians this evening we have a medley of forest floor sweet-meats gathered from our very own woodland dell. . . .” And so it goes for anything up to half an hour. My wife, who is more sophisticated than I, is not fazed by the ornate terminology. Her problem is trying to keep straight the bewilderment of options. She will listen carefully, then say: “I’m sorry, is it the squib that’s pan-seared and presented on a bed of organic spoletto?” “No, that’s the baked donkling,” says the serving person. “The squib comes as a quarter-cut hank, lightly rolled in payapaya, then tossed with oil of olay and calamine, and presented on a bed of chaff beans and snoose noodles.” - location 283


In 1992 (the latest year for which figures are available) more than 400,000 people in the United States were injured by chairs, sofas, and sofa beds. What are we to make of this? Does it tell us something trenchant about the design of modern furniture or merely that we have become exceptionally careless sitters? - location 351


Predictably, “stairs, ramps, and landings” was the most lively category, with almost two million startled victims, but in other respects dangerous objects were far more benign than their reputations might lead you to predict. More people were injured by sound-recording equipment (46,022) than by skate-boards (44,068), - location 356


Paper money and coins (30,274) claimed nearly as many victims as did scissors (34,062). I can just about conceive of how you might swallow a dime and then wish you hadn’t (“You guys want to see a neat trick?”), but I cannot for the life of me construct hypothetical circumstances involving folding money and a subsequent trip to the ER. It would be interesting to meet some of these people. - location 360


But the people I would really like to meet are the 142,000 hapless souls who received emergency room treatment for injuries inflicted by their clothing. What can they be suffering from? Compound pajama fracture? Sweatpants hematoma? I am powerless to speculate. - location 366


Interestingly, what had brought me to the Statistical Abstract in the first place was the wish to look up crime figures for the state of New Hampshire, where I now live. I had heard that it is one of the safest places in America, and indeed the Abstract bore this out. There were just four murders in the state in the latest reporting year—compared with over 23,000 for the country as a whole—and very little serious crime. All that this means, of course, is that statistically in New Hampshire I am far more likely to be hurt by my ceiling or underpants—to cite just two potentially lethal examples—than by a stranger, and, frankly, I don’t find that comforting at all. - location 373


What is frustrating is that it seldom matters whether these rules make any sense or not. A year or so ago, as a way of dealing with the increased threat of terrorism, America’s airlines began requiring passengers to present photographic identification when checking in for a flight. The first I heard of this was when I showed up to catch a plane at an airport 120 miles from my home. “I need to see some picture ID,” said the clerk, who had the charm and boundless motivation you would expect to find in someone whose primary employment perk is a nylon tie. “Really? I don’t think I have any,” I said and began patting my pockets, as if that would make a difference, and then pulling cards from my wallet. I had all kinds of identification—library card, credit cards, social security card, health insurance card, airline ticket—all with my name on them, but nothing with a picture. Finally, at the back of the wallet I found an old Iowa driver’s license that I had forgotten I even had. “This is expired,” he sniffed. “Then I won’t ask to drive the plane,” I replied. “Anyway, it’s fifteen years old. I need something more up to date.” I sighed and rooted through my belongings. Finally it occurred to me that I was carrying one of my books with my picture on the jacket. I handed it to him proudly and with some relief. He looked at the book and then hard at me and then at a printed list. “That’s not on our list of Permissible Visual Cognitive Imagings,” he said, or something similarly vacuous. “I’m sure it isn’t, but it’s still me. It couldn’t be more me.” I lowered my voice and leaned closer to him. “Are you seriously suggesting that I had this book specially printed so I could sneak on to a flight to Buffalo?” - location 402


This, you see, is why I don’t call my computer helpline very often. We haven’t been talking four seconds and already I can feel a riptide of ignorance and shame pulling me out into the icy depths of Humiliation Bay. - location 511


I have a teenage son who is a runner. He has, at a conservative estimate, sixty-one hundred pairs of running shoes, and every one of them represents a greater investment of cumulative design effort than, say, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. These shoes are amazing. I was just reading a review in one of his running magazines of the latest in “Sport Utility Sneakers,” as they are evidently called, and it was full of passages like this: “A dual density EVA midsole with air units fore and aft provides stability while a gel heel-insert absorbs shock, but the shoe makes a narrow footprint, a characteristic that typically suits only the biomechanically efficient runner.” Alan Shepard went into space with less science at his disposal than that. - location 675


Never mind that many of these keys duplicate the functions of other keys, while others apparently do nothing at all (my favorite in this respect is one marked “Pause,” which when pressed does absolutely nothing, raising the interesting metaphysical question of whether it is therefore doing its job), - location 691


On the dashboard of our family car is a shallow indentation about the size of a paperback book. If you are looking for somewhere to put your sunglasses or spare change, it is the obvious place, and it works extremely well, I must say, so long as the car is not actually moving. However, as soon as you put the car in motion, and particularly when you touch the brakes, turn a corner, or go up a gentle slope, everything slides off. There is, you see, no lip around this dashboard tray. It is just a flat space with a dimpled bottom. It can hold nothing that has not been nailed to it. So I ask you: What then is it for? Somebody had to design it. It didn’t just appear spontaneously. Some person—perhaps, for all I know, a whole committee of people in the Dashboard Stowage Division—had to invest time and thought in incorporating into the design of this vehicle (it’s a Dodge Excreta, if you’re wondering) a storage tray that will actually hold nothing. That is really quite an achievement. - location 702


America already had lots of motels by then (the very first appears to have been Askins’ Cottage Camp built in 1901 in Douglas, Arizona), but they were all called something else— auto court, cottage court, hotel court, tour-o-tel, auto hotel, bungalow court, cabin court, tourist camp, tourist court, trav-o-tel. For a long time it looked like tourist court would become the standard designation for an overnight stopping place. It wasn’t until about 1950 that motel achieved generic status. - location 734


As late as 1962, 98 percent of motels were individually owned, so each one had its own character. - location 746


as three other leading economists dryly observed in an article in the Atlantic Monthly last year: “By the curious standard of the GDP, the nation’s economic hero is a terminal cancer patient who is going through a costly divorce.” - location 899


Take the matter of having your groceries bagged for you. I appreciate the gesture and all, but when you come down to it what does it actually get you except the leisure to stand and watch your groceries being bagged? It’s not as if it buys you some quality time. - location 969


It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the importance of cupholders in automotive circles these days. The New York Times recently ran a long article in which it tested a dozen family cars. It rated each of them for ten important features, among them engine size, trunk space, handling, quality of suspension, and, yes, number of cupholders. - location 1104


Some cars, like the newest model of the Dodge Caravan, come with as many as seventeen cupholders. - location 1108


There are two hundred million cars in the United States— 40 percent of the world’s total, for about 5 percent of its population—and - location 1120

Written in 1996-98 after his return to live in New Hampshire with his family after 20+ years in England, these columns written for British audiences in the Mail on Sunday magazine are very humourous in Bryson fashion, usually self-deprecating and entertaining on the cultural differences.

When in doubt and/or a funky reading mood, pick a Bill Bryson book - that's my (newest) motto.

As much as I'd love to re-read favourite books - if only to reacquaint myself with the story/characters and/or to check if they still thrill me as much, it's difficult to do so, when many unread books are beckoning me to pay attention. For the past month or so I've been a reluctant reader. Luckily, I'm still able to listen to audiobooks. So when perusing the library overdrive for audiobooks, I spotted this book and I had to download it even though I read it 10-15 years ago.

If the number of owned books is an indication of how much you love a certain author, then the eleven Bill Bryson books gathering dust on my bookshelf make him my favourite author. My love for him, better said for his wit, humour, intelligence, sarcasm, curiosity, observation skills and snark, has reached its highest level and after all these years it's still intact.

This book is a collection of weekly columns penned by Bryson between 1996-98. Dated, right? Or is it? Let's see:
- mass incarceration for minor offences, injustice, the death penalty issues relating to the immense costs, inequality of who gets put to death and most importantly, people wrongly convicted - still current and getting worse;
- airline companies not doing a very good job as service providers - check
- people being dumber and dumber, and the increasing trend of dumbing down - check
- too much choice, too much of anything, over-consumerism, disregard for the environment and conserving resources - check
- mindless shopping - check
- having a million and one TV channels and nothing to watch - check.
I'm guessing most people still have to drive everywhere as most places don't make any allowances for pedestrians?

Things that have changed: desktop computers seem to have put the serial numbers in more accessible places :-), oh, and who remembers the last time they spoke to a real person in a company about installing/setting up anything you bought from them?

While listening to this, I couldn't help wonder "what would Bryson make of today's this and that". I wish he still wrote weekly columns. I would even buy a magazine/newspaper subscription to read his musings.

I have always wanted to read Bill Bryson's books for a long time and can say that I found this novel extremely funny and saw me chuckling well into the night. It gave me a better understanding of the culture of Americans and the culture shock that Bryson found on returning to the United States. There are a number of essays with various subject matter ranging from policies on drugs to "where has the year gone ?" The same place as my hair. The whole time he was poking fun at himself a lot. It also gave me informative statistics of why Americans only walk 350 yards a day and the importance placed on cars and exercise and a whole lot more. Well worth a read.

WHAT IS IT ABOUT?

“I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America after Twenty Years Away” by Bill Bryson is a collection of seventy comical weekly columns written for the British newspaper “Mail on Sunday” in 1996-1998. After living in Britain for almost two decades, Bryson moved back to the United States, his homeland. Together with his English wife and four children, Bryson settled down in Hanover, New Hampshire, from where he wrote the weekly columns about his reacquaintance with American culture. “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” is full of hilarious and shamelessly frank observations of American lifestyle in the ‘90s as well as nostalgic reminiscences of America in the ‘70s.

THUMBS UP:

1) Thoughtful, sidesplittingly hilarious and seemingly effortless.
I sincerely don’t remember the last time a BOOK made me laugh out loud so hard, so many times. It seems like Bryson can write an engaging, thoughtful and, above all, hilarious essay about absolutely ANYTHING, let it be dental floss, breakfast pizza, keyboard, garbage disposal, cupholder, or taxes. What is more, he makes the writing seem effortless, as if he wrote the essays as fast as I’ve read them.

2) Charismatic personality.
In addition to being clumsy and childishly silly, Bryson is often grumpy and rather whiny. But, underneath his crankiness, you can see a glimpse of a warm, bright, observant, humble, and extremely witty personality that instantly wins you over. Oh, and he NEVER misses a chance to laugh at himself.

3) Outdated but still quite relevant.
Although “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” was written more than sixteen years ago, in its pages I could easily recognize my own impressions of the US when I first came here five years ago (choice abundance, vastness of the country, incomprehensive tax forms and bizarre junk food options, just to name a few). I guess some things never change. The other more time-sensitive essays on technology and ‘90s statistics as well as snippets from the author’s childhood maybe are not that relevant but definitely highly entertaining (and also quite educational).

COULD BE BETTER:

1) Not meant to be read all at once.
“I’m a Stranger Here Myself” is kind of a bathroom read and is most enjoyable if read in short spurts over time (like weekly columns are supposed to be read). Otherwise, the essays become a little bit repetitive and tiresome, and Bryson’s whining, though truly hilarious, finally gets to you.

VERDICT: 4 out of 5

“I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America after Twenty Years Away” is a collection of thoughtful, hilarious and still quite relevant weekly columns on American lifestyle in the 90s, and it is best read in short spurts over time.

If you like reading brief, amusing but unrelated snippets about the oddities of life, this may be the book for you. There’s nothing very original in it, but some readers no doubt enjoy the empathy of saying “Oh, I’ve always thought that too”.

It’s a collection of short articles written for a weekly British news magazine about adapting to life in the US, after 20 years living in Britain – comparing the two countries and comparing the US of his youth with the version he now finds himself in. And guess what he finds in the US? Computer help desks are annoying; Americans are litigious and always want to blame someone else; the news is xenophobic; Toys R Us is a silly name; spell checkers are annoying and not very useful; irony is uncommon; obesity is a problem and there are helplines for all consumer products, including dental floss.

Whilst it’s often quite funny, I prefer a book, whether fact or fiction, to have some sort of sequence. This would be better as source material for standup routines of observational comedy (or in its original form).

Because it was written for a British audience, it’s accessible even to those with little experience or knowledge of the US (whereas Notes from a Small Island needs quite a lot of explanation to some US readers).

Of its kind, I suppose it is pretty good (4*), but as I didn’t especially enjoy it, I’ll only give it 3*. (I bought it in a single volume with Notes from a Small Island and assumed it was a similar travelogue, but set in the US.)

I'm a Stranger Here Myself (published as Notes from a Big Country in the UK) is the only thing I've read by Bryson, yet I'm confident declaring that absolutely anything else he has written is probably better. I typically don't finish the books I would give one star, but this is fast reading and all I had at poolside one day. While I found this text borderline reprehensible, I suspect Bryson's work in general might even be good; but this isn't. Here are some of my problems: half the essays read like a talented high school student's homework assignment turned in a day late and composed in 20 minutes. For example, in The Cupholder Revolution, Bryson fills space by enumerating Swedish names with alliteration found in Stockholm's phonebook. This is supposed to be comedy, I realize, but it's neither informative nor compelling. The essays which don't suffer from space-filling minutiae utilize a common gimmick: Bryson finds a transaction or technology with extensive "fine print" and satirizes the content. This theme is repeated with the PC, car rental, calling a computer helpline, airplane flight and the IRS. Bryson thankfully withholds the urge to extend this gimmick to INS (these days the USCIS) -- his essay about registering a foreign-born family member (Drowning in Red Tape) is perhaps the only essay that balances sincerity with comedy to elevate the material. These essays might work as a weekly newspaper column (indeed the original format): digestible in 30 seconds and better skimmed than read in detail. It's possible I gave up on the text as soon as I read the introduction, when Bryson claims he repeatedly turned down the offer to write the column, feigning being too busy, yet found himself committed nonetheless.

Audiobook. Reminded me of reading Dave Barry as a teenager, both because the subjects included Y2K and 1990s diet fads, and because the writing is such a delight.

Abso-frickin-lutely hilarious.

My favorite chapters, the ones that left me helplessly chortling, teary-eyed, and holding my aching tummy, were as follows (not the names, just the descriptions):

1. Ordering dinner in a frou-frou restaurant with unlikely ingredients
2. Filling out one's federal income tax return
3. Setting up a home computer

Some of the funniest prose I have ever, ever read. Bill Bryson is a genius, and that is really all you need to know.