This is the second time I have read this book and since my initial introduction to Bryson, I have gotten used to his sometimes snide comments by reading some of his others works. It brought up my rating from my original review which is found below.

"Being an Anglophile I knew I would like this book and I did.....at least most of it. Bryson, who lived in the UK for a number of years, writes this as a farewell to the "sceptered isle". Having spent time in England I could relate to some of the anecdotes and much of it was hilarious...... but there was a snide undertone which I did not like. This may just be his style since I have not read any of his other books but it was somewhat irritating to this reader. That aside, it was a lot of fun and overall I enjoyed it."

Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson is an ode to Britain, lovingly written by an American who lived there for almost twenty years and wanted to revisit it before departing for his home country. I have especially enjoyed the audio version. If you do not like curmudgeons, this will not be the book for you. Bryson, with tongue firmly planted in cheek, will take you on a tour of all things great and not so great. His grumpiness, sometimes endearing, sometimes not, will accompany the reader while visiting the UK, from countryside to big cities, to small villages. His love of this country is visible in both his criticism and his praise of it. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and it made me wish I was there. Highly recommended.

I can't believe I just gave a Bill Bryson book one star. I feel like I should be ashamed but this is just one of the most tedious books I've ever read.

Normally Bryson's books are filled with interesting/weird/funny anecdotes, history pieces, and good old fashioned fun facts. Usually I'm smiling, nodding along in agreement, laughing out loud, and/or finding the person closest to me and going "OMG listen to this!"

There is none of that here.

This book is literally just Bryson walking from one tiny, obscure English town to the next and describing either how glorious it is or how much it sucks. These declarations are based 90% on how pretty he found the town to be.

This book is the equivalent of someone describing their vacation pictures to you after leaving the actually photos at home. Spoiler alert: the pictures are all of scenery and food. Occasionally they will mention such and such person and how amazingly [adverb] they are/were .... but never elaborate.

Highlights:

Chapter 12: Directions. These are actually in a lot of the chapters, but he spends paragraphs and paragraphs telling you the exact directions of where he is going. Are we expected to follow him?

Chapter 13: This is a 9 page rant that basically boils down to "HOW DARE some moron change the benches from alabaster to eggshell at the corner of Nowhere and Obscure! Don't they know the history they've destroyed?!" This also happens in a variety of chapters. The book seriously could have benefited from some before and after pictures if the changes are really so mind blowing.

Chapter 14: 3 pages on the importance of hedges. He even threatens to punch the next person who tells him hedges aren't that important.

Chapter 17: Another 3 pages describing an IMAX movie.

I would only recommend this book for someone who has lived/been to a lot of these rural places but also does not live in England anymore. I can't imagine enjoying this book if it doesn't send your nostalgia meter to max.

Easily my favourite Bryson book and one I happily recommend as a light hearted introduction to Britain.

Bryson is the perfect coffee and a doughnut writer. You can read him while concentrating on your coffee and it will pass your time pleasantly, maybe you won't gain anything from this exercise, no wisdom, no insight, no sudden new understanding but he won't cost you anything either  apart from an expanding doughnut packed body and mindNotes from a Big Island is the epitome of his art - the collected, USA themed, journalism that he wrote when he returned to America after a spell living in the UK  before bouncing back to the UK . Short, easy reading, and mildly comforting, even if lacking in nutrition for the hungry brain.

In this book I've always particularly enjoyed his recollections from his first visit to the UK and his reflections of working in newspapers in the pre-Wapping days. There are some nice vignettes of editors shocked to discover the people who were working for them, the arcane process of collecting expenses - which with careful consideration could be worked out to be more than the weekly wage, and the terrible days when this all came to an end as a legion of sun tanned Australian accountants descended on the newspaper office with forensic thoroughness to assess the true level of wear and tear on pencils and to count the stock of typewriter ribbons.

This book is 30% random information about Britain, 10% witty humor, and 60% Bryson constantly complaining about what he thinks is wrong. At first the reading was amusing, and there are good passages that contain great cultural observations from an outsider's perspective, but Bryson is a biased, self-absorbed liberal, and his narrow-minded perspective often gets in the way of what could have potentially been a greater book. True, clever little observations about various iconic landmarks gave the prose a lighter feel, but they became merely the sprinkles upon a disappointingly dry and tasteless text.

Bryson randomly skips over, or writes one boring paragraph about, certain towns he visits and doesn't happen to like. I was looking forward to learning all about the culture and quirks of different places in Britain and its people, but Bryson's rants ended up as an annoyingly preachy, mediocre diary. I was hoping for another The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, and was disappointed; but, determined to finish it, I did appreciate the parts where I actually learned something. I definitely will read more of Bryson's books, simply for his unique, if random, perspective. But I think I'll ere on the side of research over personal accounts.

----

Later Update:
Now that I've read more of Bryson's "researched" books, I feel I should go back to reading his personal accounts! If his research is just as biased by his personal opinions, why not just read the opinions for what they are? Humph.

Quite an entertaining book. Bryson is at his best when presented with oddities and eccentricities he can describe to, what he seems to presume anyway, a foreign audience who will be all agog at such just how different the British are. Its quite amusing to have our foibles pointed out by an American anyway, so this British person at least, enjoyed the book.

I was confused whether I should give the book 4 stars or 5 stars. But, well, I love Britain, love travel and really like living here (moved here from India 5 years ago) and the book made me emotional and cry in the end. So, 5 stars. Because why not?

For context: this is a humorous travelogue by Bill Bryson (an American who lived in the UK for 20 years) who decided to go on a trip across Britain before moving back to the US.

I was very, and I am not exaggerating, VERY excited about this book as soon as I came to know of it. I wouldn't say I absolutely loved every bit of it. Bryson spent a little more than the first 50% of the book exploring just the south (and probably parts of the midlands?) of England, which was a bit worrying, but as he himself realised during the trip, he had underestimated the total amount of time it would take to cover the whole of Britain and ended up spending a lot of time in one part of England in the beginning itself. He spends 20-25% talking about the rest of England and Wales and the final 20% talking about Scotland. He did not cover the Cairngorms, which is basically the highlight of the Scottish Highlands and I found that very surprising!

A lot of times I wondered if he really liked Britain, or if he hated it. But then again, his individual sense of humour + the self-deprecating British humour that might have rubbed off on him (he being an 'honorary Brit' as someone said) surely explains why he writes of some places the way he does (or probably, he just hates them). I would not have appreciated it if the whole book was replete with ONLY moans about certain aspects of the places he visited, so I greatly valued it when he talked seriously about a lot of things: the beauty of the Lake District, the changes in Oxford, the importance of maintaining the traditional architecture of cities and towns that make Britain what it is, and the likes. What I did not appreciate is the couple of times he spoke (and interestingly, admitted it) rudely to people; I saw no need of it. It made me like him a little less.... but I don't know him and am ready to give him the benefit of doubt. I also wish he named the chapters instead of calling them 'Chapter One, Chapter Two', etc. It would have been helpful for people who want to go back to a chapter pertaining a particular town.

Different people may perceive this book differently, depending on whether they live in Britain or not. All in all, I think it gives a decent insight into what living in Britain is like. There are a lot of places mentioned in the book that I have not been to. I will take Bryson's 'review' of those places with a pinch of salt (also this book is at least 20 years old and places change over time), but the reviews are definitely helpful to some extent if you'd like to know what to expect in a place.

It is rare for me to give a book which I 'complain' about to so much extent 5 stars, but as I said, I cried in the end.

Reading this made me yearn to return to Britain and to even live there again. Bill Bryson has a true gift for humour and description. There were so many parts that had me laughing hilariously, and some that got me all nostalgic, such as visiting the small town where I attended beauty school so many years ago – a town that’s so infrequently visited, that when he got off the train, everyone had their heads to the window, looking at him in utter surprise, as in why, on God’s green earth, would anyone get off here?
I’m sorry the book ended, I wanted him to keep going on. I’m even sorrier to learn that he won’t be writing any more travelogues, but I still have several yet to read and many of these, I’ll be more than happy to re-read.

I enjoyed this - a fun look at Britain and British life, a little out-dated now but thoroughly funny and insightful throughout.

Before returning to his native United States after a sojourn of some twenty years in England, Bryson decided to take a trip around that "small island." The hysterical comments in this book are the result. The British loved it so much it was a best-seller for months, and they turned it into a TV series. The book even includes a glossary of English terms. For example, do you know the difference between a village and a hamlet? One is a small town where people live, the other a play by Shakespeare!

Bryson is certainly not your average travel writer - as anyone who has read my reviews of his other books knows - and despite his often scathing wit, it's never done with malice, even when very critical of a subject. What astounds me is Bryson's vigor and willingness to put up with all sorts of cold and wet weather. He made his trek during the off-season, i.e., late October, not an especially delightful time of year in Britain. He did not take a car, relying solely on buses and British Rail, a decision that often forced him to make long, out-of-the-way walks of as far as twenty miles, either because schedules didn't
coincide, or the irregular bus did not run during the off-season.

He delightfully intermingles political commentary with travelogue. He visits Blackpool, for example, where there are long beaches - that officially don't exist. "I am not making this up. In the late 1980s, when the European Community issued a directive about the standards of ocean-borne sewage, it turned out that nearly every British seaside town failed to come anywhere near even the minimum compliance levels. Most of the bigger resorts like Blackpool went right off the edge of the turdometer, or whatever they measure these things with. This presented an obvious problem to Mrs. Thatcher's government, which was loath to spend money on British beaches when there were perfectly good beaches in Mustique and Barbados, so it drew up an official decree -- this is so bizarre I can hardly stand it, but I swear it is true -- that Brighton, Blackpool, Scarborough, and many other leading resorts did not have, strictly speaking, beaches. Christ knows what it then termed these expanses of sand -- intermediate sewage buffers, I suppose -- but in any case it disposed of the problem without either solving it or costing the treasury a penny, which is of course the main thing, or in the case of the present government, the only thing."

Then there's British Rail. On his way to Manchester, "we crept a mile or so out of the station, then sat for a long time for no evident reason. Eventually, a voice announced that because of faults further up the line this train would terminate in Stockport, which elicited a general groan. Finally, after about twenty minutes, the train falteringly started forward and limped across the green countryside. At each station the voice apologized for the delay and announced anew that the train would terminate in Stockport. When at last we reached Stockport, ninety minutes late, I expected everyone to get off, but no one moved, so neither did I. Only one passenger, a Japanese fellow, dutifully disembarked, then watched in dismay as the train proceeded on, without explanation and without him, to Manchester."

No Bryson should be left unread.

Стори ми се доста по-забавен и интересен пътепис от пътеписа му за Европа. Хареса ми, че Брайсън се навря в доста забутани местенца, както и това, че се придвижва често пеш или с обществен транспорт. Тъй като съм от същия вид побъркани, събрах полезна информация. Би ми харесало към книгата да има някаква символична карта на маршрута и тук-таме по някоя снимка, но какво да се прави... Поне сега с Интернет можеш да видиш на снимка всичко, което те интересува.

Само едно не разбрах - защо истинските туристи си слагат крачолите в чорапите?:)

In a chapter of this book about travels through Wales, Bill Bryson sits in a cafe on a rainy afternoon and reflects that someday his enjoyable moment will be twenty years ago. Well twenty years have passed I think, and the fat jokes that were hackneyed when Bryson wrote them, are just so tired and pathetic now that I want to put my head down on the table and stay there forever.
If I ever meet Bill Bryson on a wander through the British countryside I will happily tell him that, although I suspect that the only person in Bryson's little universe who gets to be rude is Bill Bryson.
He did get some laughs out of me though, since a little snark and violent hyperbole are my thing sometimes. And he clearly loves Britain, and I also love it, and he moved here as an American ages ago and I did the same recently, and the shared experiences were fun to see. I also learned a few things.
But good lord.