I got this book by mistake and almost didn't read it. But I'm glad I did. Because The Crown . Now I realize the two got nothing to do with one another but Netflix sure knows how to jack you up. Despite the fact I despise monarchy of any sorts. Good book this , do read it.

O despărțire afectuoasă și plină de umor (mi se pare că n-am mai râs de una singură, tare, citind o carte, de ani întregi) de Marea Britanie. Atât de savuroasă e descrierea acestei călătorii, încât îmi vine să sar în primul tren și să plec prin țară. Și mai mult îmi vine să iau un avion spre UK.
Mi-ar fi plăcut să zăbovească mai mult în fiecare loc și să vorbească mai mult despre oamenii întâlniți. Dar poate tocmai lipsa asta te face să vrei mai mult să mergi să îi cunoști chiar tu.

It was hardly surprising to discover that the first book I finished in 2008 was one of my comfort re-reads. For these are the books I treasure, in the absolute certainty that whenever I feel bored, depressed, tired, lonely, miserable, or just over-whelmed by daily life I can pull them out and indulge in the healing power of the written word.

And Bill Bryson's “Notes from a Small Island” must be recorded as the ultimate comfort re-read for an expat Brit; providing on every page diversions that are fascinating, enlightening, humourous, or just plain nostalgic. I must confess that in general I find Bryson's travel writing merely mildly entertaining, and inferior to his other non-fiction. Notes from a Small Island is the one, outstanding exception. Bryson finds his true metier and calling when he is explaining to the British what makes them British, and why he adores them.

Bryson rants about things which deserve a rant such as preserving hedgerows, the petty annoyances of driving, the money spent on national parks, British attitudes about American English, and hideous modern architecture.
He treasures the things which should be treasured: queuing, politeness, puddings, or three dozen English people having a picnic on a mountaintop in an ice storm.
He's widely knowledgeable and well-researched in Roman history, utterly insane and reclusive members of the gentry, pit painters, cursed homes, Victorian industrialists, and the numbers of motorboats registered on Lake Windemere.
He's a talented comedian, turning every little story from his past into a humourous gem.
He's (mostly) aware enough of his own personal character flaws – grumpiness, irrational disklikes, shyness on public transport – as to be able to make fun of them.
And best, he’s so full of wonder, curiosity, and joy. He's curious about placenames, linguistics (why did they call it a 'grapefruit'?), the potato marketing board, psychology, gender differences, and the timetabling abilities of the Blaenau Ffestiniog railway.

From the underpants-clad-head at the start, to the Seattle-Carlisle railway at the end, I know I can open this book anywhere and find something entertaining, edifying, or enlightening.

This book combines several of my favorite things: travelogues, England, and the charm of Bill Bryson.

It is the book version of comfort food.

So you can understand why I instinctively reached for this audiobook on the the first day of my new job. I wanted something comforting. And humorous. And British.

I was instantly gratified. Bryson begins his book about touring England by describing how intensely Brits will argue about distance and driving routes:

"If you mention in the pub that you intend to drive from, say, Surrey to Cornwall, a distance that most Americans would happily go to get a taco, your companions will puff their cheeks, look knowingly at each other, and blow out air as if to say, 'Well, now, that's a bit of a tall order,' and then they'll launch into a lively and protracted discussion of whether it's better to take the A30 to Stockbridge and then the A303 to Ilchester, or the A361 to Glastonbury via Shepton Mallet. Within minutes the conversation will plunge off into a level of detail that leaves you, as a foreigner, swiveling your head in quiet wonderment ... Give two or more men in a pub the names of any two places in Britain and they can happily fill hours. Wherever it is you want to go, the consensus is generally that it's just about possible as long as you scrupulously avoid Okehampton, the North Circular in London, and the Severn Bridge westbound between the hours of 3 p.m. on Friday and 10 a.m. on Monday, except bank holidays when you shouldn't go anywhere at all."

The whole book was immensely enjoyable. The plan was for Bryson to take a last tour of England before he and his family moved to America for a few years. (Bryson is from the States, but his wife is British.) He was going to travel mostly by public transportation, because his wife wouldn't let him have the car. (HA!) There did not seem to be a logic to his journey -- instead he went hither and thither as he desired, sometimes jumping on a bus or train if it happened to arrive while he was standing there. A few times he broke down and rented a car or took a cab, but he always gave a good reason.

As someone who has not visited England in more than 15 years* (and what a sad realization it was to do the math), I could only relate to a few stops on his journey. But I still loved his meanderings and his musings. And I will continue to find more Bill Bryson audiobooks because they are just so delightful.

Update July 2016
*This was a delightful re-read! I had the good fortune to visit England earlier this summer — so it's no longer been 15 years since I've been there — and decided to listen to Bryson's audiobook again. It was great to have a better understanding of where he visited, and to enjoy his amusing stories. When I have some time I'll add more to the Favorite Quotes section, because there are lots of fun ones. Highly recommended to fans of travelogues and/or England.

First Read: August 2014
Second Read: July 2016

Favorite Quotes
"I can never understand why Londoners fail to see that they live in the most wonderful city in the world. It is, if you ask me, far more beautiful and interesting than Paris and more lively than anywhere but New York -- and even New York can't touch it in lots of important ways. It has more history, finer parks, a livelier and more varied press, better theaters, more numerous orchestras and museums, leafier squares, safer streets, and more courteous inhabitants than any other large city in the world."

"I spent two days driving through the Cotswolds and didn't like it at all -- not because the Cotswolds were unlovely but because the car was. You are so sealed off from the world in a moving vehicle, and the pace is all wrong. I had grown used to moving about at walking speed or at least British Rail speed, which is often of course much the same thing."

"I have a small, tattered clipping that I sometimes carry with me and pull out for purposes of private amusement. It's a weather forecast from the Western Daily Mail and it says, in toto, 'Outlook: Dry and warm, but cooler and with some rain.' There you have in a single pithy sentence the English weather captured to perfection: dry but rainy with some warm/cool spells. The Western Daily Mail could run that forecast every day -- for all I know, it may -- and scarcely ever be wrong."

I've had this on my to-read list for years and had always assumed that when I got around to reading it, I would love it. How could I not love a travelogue written by a self-proclaimed Anglophile?

A few sentences did make me chuckle, and I will say that Bryson is a pretty good writer. But overall, this book was a big disappointment. From the other reviews I've read on GR, it seems like I'm not the only one with these specific gripes:

1. Constant whingeing: it seemed fitting to use that word for a book set in England. At least once per chapter, Bryson rants at length about how much England has gone downhill--specifically in terms of how modern architecture is ruining England. I'm all for historic preservation and certainly don't enjoy the concrete look either, but does it need to be mentioned in the same exact way on every other page of the book? His negativity really set the tone for the book.

2. Lack of depth: each chapter of this book is exactly the same. Bryson arrives in a town, finds a hotel that is either extremely cheap and awful or overpriced and extravagant, walks around the town, whinges about the architecture, gets drunk alone in a pub, and then eats at an Indian or Chinese restaurant. He then takes a train to the next town and repeats everything. Apart from a few stereotypical comments about English people, there are almost no meaningful observations about life in England. Some of the history that he throws in was interesting, such as the parts on mining towns, but I found there wasn't enough of it.

3. Bryson himself: based on the very limited number of human interactions he mentions in his book, Bryson doesn't come across as a very likable person. He wrote at length about how disgusting it was to watch an obese family eat their dinner in a restaurant. He berated an innkeeper for locking the door of the inn at 9pm (which I understand would be frustrating, but the harshness of Bryson's comments to him were unwarranted). My least favorite of all is when he snapped at a McDonald's employee for asking if he wanted an apple turnover with his meal, yelling "why would you ask me such a thing?" and "if I wanted an apple turnover, wouldn't I ask for one?" - to which the poor employee explained that he was required to ask if people wanted an apple turnover. Doesn't everyone know that restaurant employees are told to ask things like this? And more importantly, who cares enough to berate some poor kid like that? It was strange that Bryson added all these rude interactions to the book, but I can only guess he thought people would find them funny. Maybe some did, but certainly not me.

I hate giving a book a bad review, and I kept wishing I could push this up to three stars--but a few funny sentences can't save a repetitive, shallow book. Bryson mentions Paul Theroux's book about England several times, and I kept wishing I were reading that instead. Give me Theroux over Bryson any day.

This book started out well enough and I really had high hopes for it, but it pretty much tanked for me after that. Bryson claims that he loves Britain and thinks it’s amazing, but all I heard was a bunch of whining and complaining about it. Every building that wasn’t the original “Georgian” style he deemed as an ugly renovation done by idiotic architects. It seemed every town he traveled to was a dump. He doesn’t really do much but travel around by bus or train (of which he also complains), and then book a room in a crappy hotel for the night after which he “ambles” to some pub to drink a few beers and eat some “adequate” food. I swear if I heard him use the word “amble” one more time I was going to puke. He hates cars so he walks everywhere he goes and then complains when he gets rained on. HELLO. You’re in Britain. It rains there all the time! Bring a damn umbrella! Or how about some rain boots! GASP! Every so often he’d interrupt his soaked “ambling” to mention the Marks and Spencer jackets people were wearing or yell at some random person for a minor infraction.

The thing is, the only time he says anything good about Britain is when mentioning how it was 20 years ago. I kid you not, the most excited he ever got about anything was when talking about an IMAX movie he went to… about AMERICA. I normally love Bill Bryson, but after this one, I think I’m going to take a break for a while.

A long way from his best work

After a lengthy residence in England, journalist Bill Bryson and his family had reached the decision to move back to their native USA. Before leaving, Bryson pulled out all the stops and embarked on a freewheeling 7 week whirlwind tour of England, Wales and Scotland. Shank's pony, bus, train, and the occasional rented car were his only modes of transportation. Of course, as one would expect, the journal from that trip formed the core of a book about the English people, their habits and customs, their towns, their buildings, their history, and the countryside and its landscapes.

Fresh from a reading of Bryson's brilliant Appalachian travelogue, A WALK IN THE WOODS, I was psyched and I had enormously high expectations for NOTES FROM A SMALL ISLAND. But, in the words of the Britons whom he had lived amongst for almost 20 years, "it were a bloomin' disappointment wot didn't come up to snuff!"

Oh, to be sure, there were moments of unutterably funny comic brilliance! But I found that on far too many occasions, Bryson used the book as a platform to preach and whine, over and over again, about the loss of British architectural heritage to the ravages of much more boring 20th century buildings and lack luster store fronts. And, please don't misunderstand me ... I couldn't agree more! To tear down some of these beautiful structures that are hundreds of years old or to raze a hedgerow for no other purpose than to erect a mall filled with a Boots, a Marks & Spencer and a MacDonalds is an unforgivable travesty. But, bless me, Bryson seemed to go on and on ... and on again! And, truth be told, if I had to listen to one more nearly endless string of cutesy British village and town names, I swore I was going to throw up and give him a real life version of the plastic vomit he was so oddly intent on purchasing as he traveled through Inverness.

In my review of A WALK IN THE WOODS, I commented that Bryson's unmatched humour took every possible form imaginable but, in NOTES FROM A SMALL ISLAND, a far larger percentage of the time was spent trying to generate laughs with Don Rickles' style of humour that always seemed to come at someone else's expense. Somehow, it all got tiresome and simply stopped being funny.

That Bryson has an eye for history, geography, and the quirky bits of local social life that can make a book like this so interesting is beyond doubt. Likewise, there is no question that he has a flair for comic delivery of his material. But "NOTES FROM A SMALL ISLAND was a long way below the standard that I enjoyed in A WALK IN THE WOODS.

Paul Weiss

I laughed myself silly when I read this. Which was quite a while ago, in the mid-to-late 1990s, whilst living in London. Reading it on the tube quite often, no less... That‘s pretty much all I remember.

There is a lovely line in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, where a character sums up why he thinks books have magical qualities - "they let you travel without moving your feet". With Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson does exactly this - he takes you on a magical journey all across Great Britain, and he does it without you having to physically move an inch.
I picked this book up not because I am an Anglophile or struck by wanderlust, but because I'd read Bryson's impeccable and charming writing before and I wanted more of where that came from. In the process, though, he did stir an incredible fascination for British culture and history within me, and scratched a travel itch I didn't know I had.
This travelogue is filled with humour, beautifully written observations about both the subject at hand and of human folly in general, and with plenty of delightful historical, cultural and architectural trivia. There's never a dull moment with Bryson, although if you are as clueless about certain iconic and not-so-iconic British locales as I was, parts of the book are a little (very little) hard to get through. Yet, Bryson makes up for these few scattered instances of tedium with his characteristic wit and laugh-out-loud humour. This is a book worth your time and laughter.

After 20 years in England, Bill Bryson decided to tour Britain in 1995 by public transport over ~6 weeks and write a book about it.

HUMOUR

There are snippets of humour and insight: “a young man with more on his mind than in it”; “carpet with the sort of pattern you get when you rub your eyes too hard”; “They were having a festival of litter... citizens had taken time off from their busy schedules to add crisp packets, empty cigarette boxes and carrier bags to the otherwise bland and neglected landscape”. However the last, of Liverpool reminds me of Wodehouse's snappier “Whit Monday, which to so many means merely one more opportunity of strewin Beauty Spots with paper bags” in A Day With the Swattesmore.

There's an amusing anecdote of him asking for directions having forgotten he was wearing pants on his head. But as the book progresses, they become fewer as the amount of repetitious moaning increases. For a self-confessed Anglophile, he often seems to dislike the place, though the weather gets off surprisingly lightly, especially given that he made the trip in late autumn.

BRYSON HERUMPHING

The lack of trains in remote areas is a particular bugbear, but what I don't understand is his outraged surprise - he'd lived in and travelled around the country for 20 years! He argues that they shouldn’t have to be profitable because traffic lights, drains and parks don’t. And at a practical level, he often changes his mind about where he's going once he's on the station platform or even on the train itself (i.e. after he should have bought a ticket), yet he never mentions encountering any problems with ticket collectors etc.

Modern architecture and urban planning are his other pet hates. He bemoans the homogeneity of high streets full of chains (rather than family shops), yet is annoyed at the lack of 24 hour opening and gives Marks and Spencer so many favourable mentions, I wondered if they sponsored him in some way.

ME HERUMPHING

Readers are treated to endless descriptions of hotels and stations, but without enough comment about actual people (with a few notable exceptions: Mrs Smegma, a lunatic in Weston, and an ancient train buff), which makes it increasingly dull. Mind you, the way he chose his wife is described in very detached terms, so maybe he’s just not really a people person. On the other hand, he occasionally throws in gratuitous expletives, which I don't find offensive, but they don’t fit the general style of the book.

Bryson claims an oddity of Manchester is that it has no motif. It's not a city I know well, but it has had The Manchester Bee for more than a century.

However, the worst offence is the lack of index or map – both of which should be essential in any travel book (an index for any non fiction book). Overseas readers might also appreciate a glossary, as it's clearly written for an audience who, if not English, are at least familiar with the country.

THE GOOD BITS

But there are plus sides, and Bryson is at his best when he goes off at a tangent and riffs on some unexpected topic.

He explains why the British would have coped well under Communism (good at queuing, tolerant of dictatorships (cf Mrs Thatcher) and boring food). He throws in potted history about the founder of Sainsbury and his mansion (but doesn’t bother to find out why it was left to rot) and the fact that the bicycle pedal was invented in Scotland.

He points out that the US has no equivalent of “taking the piss” and that while US soaps are about glamorous people who can’t act, British ones are the opposite.

Rather than extolling the innovation of the tube map (which isn't in the book), he suggest tricks to play on tourists e.g. by getting the tube from Bank to Mansion House (1 change, 6 stops) to end up 200 yards from where they started.

Best of all, he delights in words: the odd and romantic place names, the differences in usage between the US and Britain and the florid language of menus. He ponders replying in kind and requesting “a lustre of water freshly drawn from the house tap and presented au nature in a cylinder of glass”!

CURATE

Overall, it’s like the famous curate’s egg: “parts of it are excellent”. I think there's a good book struggling to get out, but it needed a decent editor to make that happen.

Unfortunately for me, I’ve never been to England, nor have I even met a great many English people in person. Yet like so many Americans, for my whole life I have been quietly enamored of British culture. Monty Python, The Beatles, John Milton, “English Breakfast Tea” (which I imagine is not what the English call it), Mr. Bean, Indian Pale Ale, the custom of tea and digestive biscuits (which I came to love during my time in Kenya), pronouncing schedule with a “sh” at the beginning—all of these have convinced me that the British really have it together. So as a kind of substitute for actually going there—which I earnestly hope to one day—I happily picked up this book, in order to learn more about this distant beacon of sarcasm and silly walks which has so enriched my life.
tt
Putting aside Bryson’s wonderful writing for a moment, I must say that he makes for an odd travel guide, to say the least. For someone who seems constitutionally cheerful and genuinely happy, he can be astoundingly misanthropic. Bryson loves everything about humans except humans themselves. He can get lost in local history, spend hours gazing at splendid architecture, comb through maps with rapacious glee, wax poetic about museums and tourist attractions—and yet every time he comes into contact with an actual person, he is exasperated beyond words. Each interaction he relates in this book, whether he was talking to someone on a train or asking for directions, ends with him thinking or saying something rude and insulting. He even indulges in some rather violent fantasizing about people who only cause him a minor inconvenience. The man is not gregarious.
tt
The result of this tendency is that you “meet” very few Brits in this book. By way of compensation, Bryson gives you a marvelous picture of the English public transit system, if that’s what you’re looking for. It is indeed rather ironic that at one point he says something incredibly disparaging about train enthusiasts—considering it a sign of insanity to be interested in trains—but fills up so much of this book complaining about trains, as if that’s any more interesting. Bryson will also describe for you the nicest and the ugliest buildings in the major cities of Great Britain, as well as relate his adventures eating Chinese food and sleeping in hotels. In short, the focus often strays from his topic to banalities and needless bitching. Having recently read In a Sunburned Country (called Down Under in the UK), published 5 years after this, I can tell that this represents a more immature phase in his writing. At the very least, this book could have used more vigorous editing.
tt
Despite all these flaws and shortcomings, I still had a great time reading this travelogue. In the early chapters especially, Bryson’s infectious love of the English language is on full display, as he rattles off lists of made-up English locales. There is also much autobiographical information here that I found charming. He tells us of his first arrival in England, and how he met his wife; he tells us of his days as a newspaper editor and of Murdoch’s takeover. And as usual, Bryson is adept at finding quaint, odd, pleasing bits of local history. But most of all I just enjoy seeing the world through Bryson’s curious and curiously misanthropic eyes. He is a delicate man, very sensitive to his surroundings, so it’s always a pleasure watching him notice things, little things, that I wouldn’t normally observe. Considering all this, perhaps I should say that he’s not such a bad travel guide after all.

I kept putting this one down and moving to another book. Reason? Bill Bryson is a cynical asshole. He is rude to locals, and seems completely miserable the vast majority of time. He is the reason why so many folks in other countries think Americans are egotistical, judgemental pricks.