Notes from a Small Island

“I like it here.”

I have an interesting relationship with Bill Bryson. I have read 4 of his books now, and have more on my “to read” pile. And I have mostly enjoyed the reads, but I don’t enjoy him. NOTES FROM A SMALL ISLAND is a travelogue through Great Britain, and although it gets repetitive (Bryson seems to say the same thing about every little town he goes through) and it does read as a little dated (originally published in 1995) I am no worse the wear for reading it. Plus I got to experience, a least a little, some moments in places I will likely never go to.

Some positive observations first.
The text is funny at times. Mr. Bryson has a very dry and sarcastic sense of humor. There is also lots of euphemistic language and understatement employed to great effect.
Another highlight of the read is chapter 17 where Mr. Bryson visits the village of Bradford and goes to see a vintage film called “This is Cinerama.” His joy in this place and moment just made me happy. His enthusiasm in describing this experience is contagious and infiltrates the reader.
The book also ends with a lovely ode to the Yorkshire Dales, and it is a perfect conclusion to the text.

Quotes:
•t“…the sort of person your P.E. teacher warned that you would turn into if you masturbated too extravagantly (someone, in short, like your P.E. teacher).
•t“The world, or at least this little corner of it, seemed a good and peaceful place, and I was immensely glad to be there.”
•t“Nothing gives the English more pleasure, in a quiet but determined sort of way, than to do things oddly.”
•t“I watched the rain beat down on the road outside and told myself that one day this would be twenty years ago.”
•t“Britain is, for all its topographical diversity and timeless majesty, an exceedingly small-scale place.”
•t“Oh I don’t think so, dear,” said the woman with the certainty of stupidity, and bestowed a condescending smile.”
•t“Can there anywhere on earth be, in such a modest span, a landscape more packed with centuries of busy, productive attainment?”
•t“I realized what it was that I loved about Britain-which is to say, all of it.”

A recurring issue that I have with Mr. Bryson is that he is often too sarcastic and mean for my tastes. There is a hint of nastiness that seems to hang around the edges of most of his actions and observations. And just as you want to tell him to ‘sod off’ he will write endearingly about a place that he found lovely despite its bad reputation and you delay throwing the book across the room. A great example of this is when he wrote about his visit to the town of Wigan.

I have more Bryson on my radar, including the follow up book to this text, and NOTES FROM A SMALL ISLAND has not given me a reason to dismiss them.

Забавна и увлекателна книга с много чувство за хумор и любов към Албиона !

I struggled whether to give this book one or two stars. I decided on the lowest rating because after only 100 pages I was ready to fling this book against a wall and forget all about it, and because Bryson's travels and description thereof are, for the most part, mind-numbingly boring. This is not to say that there is absolutely nothing of merit. Bryson is by no means a horrible writer. He can be very clever and witty, though jokes can only carry you so far. Half the time he merely came off as an asshole or the very type of old curmudgeon that he was so fond of belittling. He does present some worthwhile gems while contemplating the nature of Britain and its people, though these were few and far between. In essence, my main problem with this book was that I found it to be more about Bryson than Britain. I also did not realize that this book was first released almost twenty years ago, which means that the vast majority of his descriptions in relation to specific cities and attractions may no longer be relevant. I can recommend this book to you if by chance you enjoy the observation of practically every car park there is to be found in Britain, the verbal abuse of McDonald's employees, and the value of a city to be based entirely upon one man's views of what constitutes as aesthetically pleasing. Even Bryson says of himself at one point, "But enough of this tedious bleating", and I have to say I wholeheartedly concur.

Check: 10 places I want to see after reading this book

I am done with Bryson's books. The main reason is that I don't like him. He is funny sometimes but most of the time he is rude, mean, makes fun of other people, does things that I don't quite like.

This was my second book and even this failed to give me much information. I picked this book up since England is on the top of my "must-visit" places from a long time. I have been imagining about this country ever since I picked my first Enid Blyton's book and after re-reading Harry Potter books umpteen times. I wanted to know what was "good" about this country and what were the places that I must visit, if I visit this country sometime in the future.

But this book failed to give me any of this information. It was more of a memoir than a book on travel. He kept comparing England with how it was in 1970s and kept complaining how it had changed for the worse. It looked more like he was on a budget trip. He was not interested in paying for even a single entrance fee or take a tour of the palace if it costed even 2 pounds. I mean, you are writing a travelogue for God's sake. So you must visit all the good and famous places in England and let the reader know what is good about the place. But it looked like he felt at peace only in the cities which had a good pub and a cheap hotel. He hated almost every human being he met on the trip and all he did in most places was eat and drink beer.

It appeared to me that he did not like most part of England. At least that is what I felt after reading the book. After finishing the book, I got a feeling that it is a pretty boring country where people hardly do anything other than eat and shop. I mean, he doesn't mention a single place which would make me go "wow.. I must visit this place" even once! I kind of got fed up of his rants and complaints about every city he visited. He hates modern buildings, less populated cities, highly populated cities, almost every place he visits.

And I think he left out many of the good tourist places in England. The ones that he did mention were just brushed upon. For some part I was confused since he mentioned cities in Scotland to be part of "British".
His books neither have pictures nor maps. Apart from his humor at times, there is nothing much that's good about this book.
I am definitely not picking any other book for his! Waste of money.

There goes my last review for 2012! Happy new year!

Bill Bryson knows that absurdity is present in everybody and can be found in almost every situation if you try to find it. He also knows absurdity is mostly lovable. And so Notes from a Small Island chronicles Bryson's tour of Britain from Dover to Glasgow, traveling generally north and almost always by public transport, not in search of the absurd but certainly quick to point it out. There's plenty to draw the reader's attention to, though what he sees as absurd he likes and is more than willing to accept. Bryson also knows a nation is its people. He writes about the English people with great warmth and affection while at the same time being aware of their eccentricities. He loves what he sees, too. He takes time to visit the sites individual towns and regions are noted for, whether it's Stonehenge or the Ashmolean in Oxford or Princes Street in Edinburgh. All along the way he has interesting things to say about almost everything Britain is famous or notorious for, including British weather, British food, the congeniality of British pubs, British Rail. In the end he's full of praise for a country responsible for cricket, pork pies, Christopher Wren, and the chocolate digestive biscuit. All those things and more Britain has given us, he writes, but they also had the farsightedness to create a comprehensive welfare state and to efficiently dismantle an empire. Nearing the end of his journey, alone again on a train gliding through the Midlands, he closes the book with a paean to a characteristic of Britain he feels is undervalued, the bucolic nature and astonishing beauty of the countryside. Bryson is absurdly in love with Britain.

Newsflash: I have a new entry into my Top Ten Authors (past and present) that I would like to invite to a night out at the pub for a session of heavy drinking and tall tales.



Bill Bryson, with his sly humour and irreverent atitude towards tourism, is a strong contender for the top position right after my first experience of travelling in his company through the twisted back lanes of historical hamlets of his cherished island. Being both a personal journal and a travel guide, his Notes have been voted as the book that best represent Britain to the world. I believe the praise is well deserved.

The secret of Bill Bryson success is easy to discern from the pages of this journal: He fell in love with the island from the first moment he landed in Dover in 1973, and his enthusiasm is as fresh and as catching two decades later as he prepares for a farewell trip before returning to America.

Everything that lay before me was new and mysterious and exciting in a way you can't imagine. England was full of words I'd never heard before - streaky bacon, short back and sides, Belisha bacon, serviettes, high tea, ice-cream cornet. [...] I spent a long day wandering aimlessly and happily along residential streets and shopping streets, eavesdropping on conversations at bus-stops and street corners, looking with interest in the windows of greengrocers and butchers and fishmongers, reading fly-posters and planning applications, quietly absorbing.



Sometimes it takes a long trip away from home or the perspective of a stranger to make you realize the beauty of the land and of the people around you, and Bill Bryson is for me the best kind of guide possible. He shares my love for walking, an impulsive nature that can change routes on the spur of a moment, and equal interest in the highbrow amusements of historical monuments or art galleries and the popular amusement parks and drinking pubs, for the statistical trivia and for the scandalous bit of gossip about the local worthies.

There is something awfully exhilarating about riding on the top of a double-decker. You can see into upstair windows and peer down on the tops of people's heads at bus-stops (and when they come up the stairs a moment later you can look at them with a knowing look that says: 'I've just seen the top of your head') and there's the frisson of excitement that comes with careering round a corner or roundabout on the brink of catastrophe. You get an entirely fresh perspective on the world.

Time and time again the words that describe the places, the people, the cuisine and the culture of Britain turn into a song of joy at the chance to witness the marvels of his adopted country. Not even the constant bad weather (roughly about two thirds of his out of season journey by my count) can keep his buoyant mood down for more than one evening. Inevitably, the next stop on the railway line or the next hill to be climbed will bring back the cheerful hiker who likes to remind the reader to count his blessings and be happy to be alive, to be healthy and to live in a peaceful period of history that makes lonely travelling an attractive proposition.

Beyond the headland, the path climbed steeply to Ballard Down, a taxing slog for an old puffed-out flubba-wubba like me, but worth it for the view, which was sensational - like being on top of the world.

For seven weeks in 1994, Bill Bryson will try to rediscover Britain from the southern Downs to the last desolate northern moors, travelling alone on foot or by public transport, a decision that I will let him explain with his usual mix of militancy and self-deprecating humour:

Motorized vehicles are ugly and dirty and they bring out the worst in people. They clutter every kerbside, turn ancient market squares into disorderly jumbles of metal, spawn petrol stations, second-hand car lots, Kwik-Fit centres and other dispiriting blights. They are horrible and awful and I wanted nothing to do with them on this trip. And besides, my wife wouldn't let me have the car.

With great enthusiasm comes also great indignation at the carelessness and disrespect for the heritage of Britain, as witnessesd in the ugliness of modern cement office blocks, proliferation of cars and highways, loss of diversity and globalization, mass tourism and the trivialization of history. In a way, Notes from a Small Island is also a snapshot of a world in danger of being swallowed up and zombified into a characterless, generic shopping mall.

It gets me a little wild sometimes. You have in this country the most comely, the most parklike, the most flawlessly composed countryside the world has ever known, a product of centuries of tireless, instinctive improvement, and you are half a generation from destroying most of it for ever.

and,
What made Weston feel familiar was, of course, that it was just like everywhere else. It had Boots and Marks&Spencer and Dixons and W. H. Smith and all the rest of it. I realized with a kind of dull ache that there wasn't a single thing here that I hadn't seen a million times already.

and,
... it was wonderful to be in a great ecclesiastical structure so little disturbed by shuffling troops of tourists. When you consider the hordes that flock to Salisbury, York, Canterbury, Bath and so many other great churches of England, Lincoln's relative obscurity is something of a small miracle.

Speaking of shopping malls, did you ever go shopping with you better half? If so, you will know what the author is talking about:

Shopping is not, in my view, something that men and women should do together since all men want to do is buy something noisy like a drill and get it home so they can play with it, whereas women aren't happy until they've seen more or less everything in town and felt at least 1500 different textures.

I have a small suspicion that Mr. Bryson had more on his mind than the perils of shopping with his wife when he decided to travel alone through the island. How else can one explain the detailed descriptions of going every night to the pub and sampling the best the Island has to offer in terms of draughts and dark ales and strong spirits? After all, a serious tourist guide must study and include details about the nightlife attractions of the places he visits . Case in point: on his very first day in Britain in 1973, our young author decided to go watch an R-rated movie called "Suburban Wife Swap" in order to improve his language skills and his knowledge of local customs. Which is another reason to trust his judgement on worthy travel spots :-)



Now the second rule of excessive drinking (the first, of course, is don't take a sudden shine to a woman larger than Hoss Cartwright) is never to drink in a place on a steep slope.

I thought about mentioning some of the places described in the Notes, and what makes them memorable, but there are too many tempting propositions and Bill Bryson does a much better job than me in selling their charms to the readership. I confess I have never visited England, and if anybody asks me what is my favorite holiday destination I will still answer without hesitation : Paris! Even after 15+ visits, it is still my first choice for a visit. But Bill Bryson's small island is making a compelling case for a revision of my priorities. If I were hard pressed to choose only one of the hundreds of interesting places mentioned in the guide, I think I would settle for Liverpool. It might not be obvious why, at first or second glance, what Liverpool offers more than the Lake District or the Cotswolds, but I grew up with the tales of Jules Verne and Joseph Conrad, and more recently Douglass Reeman and Patrick O'Brian, and I always dreamed that one day I will embark for a voyage around the world's blue lanes:

Once there was infinite romance in the sea, and the Merseyside Maritime Museum captures every bit of it. [...] J. B. Priestley called them the greatest constructions of the modern world, our equivalent of cathedrals, and he was absolutely right. I was appalled to think that never in my life would I have an opportunity to stride down a gangplank in a panama hat and a white suit and go looking for a bar with a revolving ceiling fan. How crushingly unfair life can sometimes be.

The rest of my review is a series of footnotes and little details that reinforce the good impression and the fun I had on my travels with this incredible guide. Do you know what the most important quality of a tourist is? Curiosity:

Why do they call it a grapefruit? Why do the British call them jumpers? Why do they call them milk floats? They don't float at all. Why do we foot a bill rather than, say, head it? Why do we say that our nose is running? (Mine slides). Who ate the first oyster and how on earth did anyone ever figure out that ambergris would make an excellent fixative for perfumes?

Do you know how to prepare for your trip? Read as much as you can about the places you are going to see (and write about):

I spent a little time watching the scenery, then pulled out my copy of Kingdom by the Sea to see if Paul Theroux had said anything about the vicinity that I might steal or modify to my own purposes.

what sort of equipment you need for your trip? The fun begins well in advance of the actual departure:

I can spend hours looking at rucksacks, kneesocks, compasses and survival rations, then go to another shop and look at precisely the same things all over again. (I wonder what his wife thought about men and their shopping habits now?)

Are you worried the locals and the other tourists will laugh at you? It's better to be ready for anything than wet and cold, so relax, and enjoy the view:

I remember when I first came to Britain wandering into a bookstore and being surprised to find a whole section dedicated to 'Walking Guides'. This struck me as faintly bizarre and comical - where I came from people did not as a rule require written instructions to achieve locomotion - but then gradually I learned that there are, in fact, two kinds of walking in Britain, namely the everyday kind that gets you to the pub and, all being well, back home again, and the more earnest type that involves stout boots, Ordnance Survey maps in plastic pouches, rucksacks with sandwiches and flasks of tea, and, in its terminal phase, the wearing of khaki shorts in inappropriate weather.

Is it worth your time and effort?

And then, just as I was about to lie down and call for a stretcher, we crested a final rise and found ourselves abruptly, magically, on top of the earth, on a platform in the sky, amid an ocean of swelling summits. I had never seen anything half so beautiful before. 'Fuck me,' I said in a moment of special eloquence and realized I was hooked.

Why would you go to a place on the map that everybody seems to run away from?

... you might learn some dirty war songs:

This fucking town's a fucking cuss
No fucking trams, no fucking bus,
Nobody cares for fucking us
In fucking Halkirk

No fucking sport, no fucking games.
No fucking fun. The fucking dames
Won't even give their fucking names
In fucking Halkirk.

When is the journey ended? when you have seen everything the world has to show you. In other words, never:

... and returned to the station feeling simultaneously impressed and desolate at just how much there was to see in this little country and what folly it had been to suppose that I might see anything more than a fraction of it in seven flying weeks.

The good news is that Bill Bryson has already written a sequel The Road to Little Dribbling and that I have already ordered two more of his other books - the one on hiking through the Appallachians, and the one on popular science. I must thank all my friends here on Goodreads who recommended this author to me. Little Dribbling, here I come:



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... about that Top Ten Fantasy Drinking Buddies, my list right now looks like this:

1. Sir Terry Pratchett
2. Spider G Robinson
3. Bill Bryson
4. Connie Willis
5. Bohumil Hrabal
6. Douglas Adams
7. Carl Hiaasen
8. Tom Robbins
9. Thomas Pynchon
10. James Crumley

It's a work in progress.

Mr Bryson has an entertaining line of patter, a nice, wry humour and he works very very hard to endear himself with the reader. Look, I'm a regular guy from Iowa who sometimes gets really narked at owners of undisciplined dogs and thinks hedgerows are A Good Thing and cars aren't. But that doesn't quite compensate for the fact that this is basically a catalogue of towns, hotel rooms and meals in restaurants - an amusing catalogue, but a catalogue all the same. Where BB gets right up my nose is with his quaint idea that Britain should have remained in a seventies time warp, preserving all those quirky little British things like red pillar boxes and old-fashioned red telephone boxes merely, it would seem, because they appeal to regular guys from Iowa. Has it escaped his notice that even British people now have mobiles, and no longer need to use smelly phone booths and, oh wonder, now write e-mails or post updates on social networks, which renders pillar boxes surplus to requirements, no matter what colour they are? And I got heartily sick of his rants about modern town architecture, he sounds like Prince Charles with a less annoying accent. I'm sure that Britain is not always a model of sensitive town planning, but what does he expect? Filling station forecourts with mock-Georgian carriage gates? Boots the chemist with all its products in brass-handled mahogany drawers? Ask those Thurso ladies he met taking the six am train for the four hour trip to Inverness to buy knickers and get their hair done. I bet they'd rather have a bland, glass fronted Marks and Spencer in Thurso, even if it did spoil the appearance of their lovely little self-sufficient community.

I only got about a third of the way through this book. I was giving Bill Bryson one more chance to impress me, but he didn't quite do it.

I would recommend this book for anyone who has lived in England, as many of the references in the book would escape someone who has not spent much time there. However, I was just never pulled in by his narrative.

I felt like Bryson writes with a perennial smirk on his face, laughing at his own cleverness as he pens various turns of the phrase. But a few funny sentences here and there, sprinkled with snarky comments and occasional self-deprecation to balance out the outwardly directed criticism do not add up to something that keeps me interested enough to read the whole book.