Kindle Author du Jour: Bill Bryson

Among the many thousands of things that I have never been able to understand, one in particular stands out. That is the question of who was the first person who stood by a pile of sand and said, "You know, I bet if we took some of this and mixed it with a little potash and heated it, we could make a material that would be solid and yet transparent. We could call it glass." Call me obtuse, but you could stand me on a beach till the end of time and never would it occur to me to try to make it into windows. - Bill Bryson.

If you read for pleasure and yawn at the idea of the innumerable vampires and empty-eyed zombies that seem to largely populate what passes for leisure reading these days, perhaps you should consider diving into one of the many entertaining books by Bill Bryson. Bryson, originally from Des Moines, Iowa, is mostly an ex-pat these days, living in Great Britain when he's not traveling around the world investigating whatever strikes his fancy - from the outback of Australia to the intricacies of atomic theory or the composition of the core of the planet Earth. He writes on science, on language and literature, and on travel - all with a touch of humor that makes nonfiction go down smoothly. Bryson books available in Kindle editions include:

Memoir:

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir. Broadway, 2006. Print length: 288 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (360 reviews). Kindle edition $8.30. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"The Thunderbolt Kid was born in the 1950s when six-year-old Bryson found a mysterious, scratchy green sweater with a satiny thunderbolt across the chest. The jersey bestowed magic powers on the wearer–X-ray vision and the power to zap teachers and babysitters and deflect unwanted kisses from old people. These are the memoirs of that Kid, whose earthly parents were not really half bad - a loving mother who didn't cook and was pathologically forgetful, but shared her love of movies with her youngest child, and a dad who was the greatest baseball writer that ever lived and took his son to dugouts and into clubhouses where he met such famous players as Stan Musial and Willie Mays. Simpler times are conveyed with exaggerated humor; the author recalls the middle of the last century in the middle of the country (Des Moines, IA), when cigarettes were good for you, waxy candies were considered delicious, and kids were taught to read with Dick and Jane..." - Jackie Gropman for The School Library Journal.

Language and Literature:

Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words. Broadway, 2002. Print length: 256 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (27 reviews). Kindle edition $8.59. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"As usual Bill Bryson says it best: 'English is a dazzlingly idiosyncratic tongue, full of quirks and irregularities that often seem willfully at odds with logic and common sense. This is a language where cleave can mean to cut in half or to hold two halves together; where the simple word set has 126 different meanings as a verb, 58 as a noun, and 10 as a participial adjective; where if you can run fast you are moving swiftly, but if you are stuck fast you are not moving at all; [and] where colonel, freight, once, and ache are strikingly at odds with their spellings.' As a copy editor for the London Times in the early 1980s, Bill Bryson felt keenly the lack of an easy-to-consult, authoritative guide to avoiding the traps and snares in English, and so he brashly suggested to a publisher that he should write one. Surprisingly, the proposition was accepted, and for 'a sum of money carefully gauged not to cause embarrassment or feelings of overworth,' he proceeded to write that book–his first, inaugurating his stellar career. Now, a decade and a half later, revised, updated, and thoroughly (but not overly) Americanized, it has become Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words. - from the hardcover edition.

Shakespeare. HarperCollins, 2007. Print length: 208 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (109 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"...In this addition to the Eminent Lives series, bestselling author Bryson...does what he does best: marshaling the usual little facts that others might overlook - for example, that in Shakespeare's day perhaps 40% of women were pregnant when they got married - to paint a portrait of the world in which the Bard lived and prospered. Bryson's curiosity serves him well, as he delves into subjects as diverse as the reliability of the extant images of Shakespeare, a brief history of the theater in England and the continuing debates about whether William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon really wrote Shakespeare's works. Bryson is a pleasant and funny guide to a subject at once overexposed and elusive..." - Publishers Weekly.

Science:

A Short History of Nearly Everything. Broadway, 2006. Print length: 560 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (839 reviews). Kindle edition $8.89. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. To that end, he has attached himself to a host of the world’s most advanced (and often obsessed) archaeologists, anthropologists, and mathematicians, traveling to their offices, laboratories, and field camps. He has read (or tried to read) their books, pestered them with questions, apprenticed himself to their powerful minds. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the record of this quest, and it is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge..." - Amazon.

Travel:

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail. Broadway, 2010. Print length: 304 p. Amazon customer rating: Kindle edition $7.59. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Returning to the U.S. after 20 years in England, Iowa native Bryson decided to reconnect with his mother country by hiking the length of the 2100-mile Appalachian Trail. Awed by merely the camping section of his local sporting goods store, he nevertheless plunges into the wilderness and emerges with a consistently comical account of a neophyte woodsman learning hard lessons about self-reliance. Bryson...(carries himself in an irresistibly bewildered manner, accepting each new calamity with wonder and hilarity. He reviews the characters of the AT (as the trail is called), from a pack of incompetent Boy Scouts to a perpetually lost geezer named Chicken John. Most amusing is his cranky, crude and inestimable companion, Katz, a reformed substance abuser who once had single-handedly 'become, in effect, Iowa's drug culture.' The uneasy but always entertaining relationship between Bryson and Katz keeps their walk interesting, even during the flat stretches. Bryson completes the trail as planned, and he records the misadventure with insight and elegance. He is a popular author in Britain and his impeccably graceful and witty style deserves a large American audience as well." - Publishers Weekly.

I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away. Broadway, 2008. Print length: 304 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (250 reviews). Kindle edition $8.63. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Bryson is the author of the best-selling A Walk in the Woods (1998), about his hike along the long stretch of the Appalachian Trail. Before that, he lived in Britain for 20 years with his English wife and their four children, working there for the Sunday Times and other publications. After his return to his native U.S., he was asked to write a weekly column for the British Night & Day magazine about his adventures and observations as he underwent the process of repatriation. These columns, written over a two-year period (1996-98), are now gathered in book form. His subject matter is the idiosyncrasies of contemporary American life, and according to Bryson, speaking from the vantage point of having been away for a long time, we certainly have loads of peculiarities in our national 'personality.' This is humor writing at its sharpest, and his saving grace is that he does more laughing with us than at us. When he has problems with his computer and calls for help, he moans, 'This, you see, is why I don't call my computer help line 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.' Drug laws and the virtues of garbage disposal are only two of the many facets of American life that Bryson has fun with." - Brad Hooper for Booklist.

At Home: A Short History of Private Life. Doubleday, 2010. Print length: 512 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (137 reviews). Kindle edition $9.55. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Bryson...takes readers on a tour of his house, a rural English parsonage, and finds it crammed with 10,000 years of fascinating historical bric-a-brac. Each room becomes a starting point for a free-ranging discussion of rarely noticed but foundational aspects of social life. A visit to the kitchen prompts disquisitions on food adulteration and gluttony; a peek into the bedroom reveals nutty sex nostrums and the horrors of premodern surgery; in the study we find rats and locusts; a stop in the scullery illuminates the put-upon lives of servants. Bryson follows his inquisitiveness wherever it goes, from Darwinian evolution to the invention of the lawnmower, while savoring eccentric characters and untoward events (like Queen Elizabeth I's pilfering of a subject's silverware). There are many guilty pleasures, from Bryson's droll prose - 'What really turned the Victorians to bathing, however, was the realization that it could be gloriously punishing' - to the many tantalizing glimpses behind closed doors at aristocratic English country houses. In demonstrating how everything we take for granted, from comfortable furniture to smoke-free air, went from unimaginable luxury to humdrum routine, Bryson shows us how odd and improbable our own lives really are." - Publishers Weekly.

In a Sunburned Country. Broadway, 2008. Print length: 320 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (467 reviews). Kindle edition $8.63. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"...this travel narrative from veteran wanderer Bryson...provides an appreciative, informative, and hilarious portrait of the land Down Under. And so once more to the wandering road, declares Bryson - which is music to the ears of his many deserving fans. This time it is Australia, a country tailor-made to surrender just the kind of amusing facts Bryson loves. It was here, after all, that the Prime Minister dove into the surf of Victoria one day and simply disappeared - the prime minister, mind you. There are more things here to kill you than anywhere else in the world: all of the ten most poisonous snakes, sharks and crocodiles in abundance, the paralytic tick, and venomous seashells that will not just sting you but actually sometimes go for you. A place harsh and hostile to life, staggeringly empty yet packed with stuff. Interesting stuff, ancient stuff, stuff not readily explained. And Bryson finds it everywhere: in the Aborigines (who evidently invented and mastered oceangoing craft 30,000 years before anyone else, then promptly forgot all about the sea), in the Outback (where men are men and sheep are nervous), in stories from the days of early European exploration (of such horrific proportions they can be appreciated only as farce), and in the numerous rural pubs (where Bryson learns the true meaning of a hangover)..." - Kirkus Reviews.

Links:

Bill Bryson's Official Website
Wikipedia Bio