Medieval Bookworm

After twenty years in England, Bill Bryson and his family moved back to his native United States, for reasons he can’t quite fathom.  To his surprise, his country has changed a lot since he last lived there.  Even though he isn’t particularly inclined to write a newspaper column about it, his friend asks him to, and his essays are published weekly.  This book is a collection of some of these essays, on topics ranging from the tax system to sports to garbage disposals.

I’m on a bit of a Bill Bryson spree these days, so I picked this book up without really thinking about it.  I found its quality to be more variable than the first two books of his I read, but overall it was still very enjoyable.  Bryson’s humor is excellent and he makes even the most mundane exchanges into passages that have me giggling away, to the extent that my husband asks what’s so funny and is, I suspect, now eager to get his hands on one of Bryson’s books.

The funniest passages were easily the ones that I have had experience with.  This book is now quite dated; it was published in 1998 and so all of the essays are from before that time.  As a result, things in America aren’t the same as they were, but I can remember a lot of this from my childhood.  The catalogues, for example; it did feel at times like we got a catalogue for everything under the sun without ever actually asking for them.  Plenty of trees were wasted for this purpose, but some of the products in catalogues were delightful and exciting, even if I can’t actually remember ever ordering anything out of them.

Some of the sections didn’t work quite so well; these are generally the few that don’t consist of actual anecdotes but are just him trying to demonstrate the absurdity of things like tax forms.  There are also some outdated ones which no longer strike the right note, like his comments on computers.  Overall, though, these are only a few pages long so they don’t detract too much from the overall humor of the book.

It’s also best to approach this knowing that mostly he makes fun of Americans and American things, but as he seems to do this with everything, it didn’t bother me.  It just amused me because most of it was true and his style of writing makes it clear that nothing is really an insult at all.  It’s just, for the most part, a very amusing book about American culture.

Notes from a Big Country is not quite a travelogue, but it’s an entertaining look at America through a former expat’s eyes.  Despite the few off notes, if you like Bill Bryson’s books, you’ll enjoy this one too.

I am an Amazon Associate. I borrowed this book from my local library.

One spring morning in Catalunya, Matthew Parris came across an awesome sight; a large, moldering, old house that immediately spoke to him.  Clearly medieval and once high status and in the process of remodeling, the house had been left to sit and rot for at least fifty years.  It was called L’Avenc; virtually everyone in the small nearby town knew about it and thought its slow destruction was sad, but none of them was going to save it.  So Parris, his sister Belinda and her husband, and her husband’s brother put together the money and purchased the house themselves.  The remodelling took longer and was more expensive than any of them had imagined, but their goal to save the house kept them going through catastrophe after catastrophe.

I’ve seen it bandied about that this entire book is mostly an advertisement for the holiday cottages Parris and his family built alongside the house, but I thought it was quite a lot more than that, especially considering I didn’t even realize that you could stay there until halfway through the book.  (Of course, I want to now, so if it was an advertisement, it worked.)  I loved the fact that these four people took on this medieval house.  One of them did research into its origins and found out the various stages of its actual construction; parts of it date from the 12th century.  Anyone who spends hundreds of thousands to rescue a medieval house is awesome, and this book truly gets across the author’s love for this house and its character.

He also conveys the vast difficulty, sometimes seemingly insurmountable, of actually restoring the house.  The roof was falling in, the floors were rotting away, and there were no plumbing, electricity, or telephone lines.  The construction went on for years, hampered by legal difficulties and an angry neighbor who cut off the family’s water supply and refused to reinstate it.  It’s not even finished when the book is, although I think it must be by now.

A Castle in Spain is also partly travelogue, with Parris extoling the virtues of various parts of Catalunya (also spelled Catalonia).  He expresses plenty of regret that people mostly visit Spain to go to cramped beaches and cities instead of exploring the beauty of its interior, Catalunya in particular.  I must admit that despite my recent interest in travelogues, I found these parts a bit boring.  I would love to visit Spain, but I am not sure Parris’s writing style is that suited to it, and I found his discussions of the house much more interesting.

This book is a very interesting tale of a family and a mission, with some history and culture thrown in for good measure.  It is perhaps not the most standout of its genre, but it certainly made me curious about the area.  I wish I could actually afford one of the holiday cottages, if only to see it all myself in person.  Recommended if you like travelogues, memoirs, and old, crumbling houses. It seems to be out of print, but used copies are about for fairly low prices.

I am an Amazon Associate. I borrowed this book from my local library.

There are more things in Australia that can kill you than anywhere else, so how could Bill Bryson ever keep away from writing a travel memoir about the country?  In his travels from coast to coast and several places in between, Bryson both entertains and informs us about a place that, for its size and place in the world, we know surprisingly little about.

Bill Bryson is a delightful writer and I almost wish I’d discovered him sooner!  Down Under is my first proper travel book by him and I can’t tell you how eager I am to read more.  It’s true that I know very little about Australia, so much of the information he shared was completely new to me.  In my job, I’ve done some writing about Australia, but mainly about tourism; it was fascinating to have the historical perspective given to me so I could set it aside my knowledge of the country’s more hospitable places.

My favorite parts of the memoir were generally when he was exploring the middle, largely uninhabitable parts of the country.  It’s hard to believe just how many expeditions were launched there – and equally hard to believe that the Australians haven’t managed to spread across such a vast amount of land.  Yet with Bryson writing, I could feel the dust and the heat and I am pretty sure I now know why no one really wants to live there; not only is it far from every amenity but there’s truly no purpose to eking a life out in such difficult conditions.

I like that Bryson seems to travel in the same way that I do; I’d struggle to really identify with someone who does things I’d never experience.  As it is, Australia is expensive, and I won’t go there for years if ever, so I could almost feel like I was experiencing things through his eyes.  He chats with people, visits monuments that I’d visit, and at the same time shares the fascinating history and culture of the country.  I can’t imagine a better honorary tour guide.  I wouldn’t have minded some pictures, but he writes well enough that I could picture the locations in my head – or just look online, as I did several times – easily enough.

What truly disturbed me overall was the treatment of native Australians – a problem that lies more with the Australian government than with Bryson.  I was appalled to learn about the Stolen Generations and even more saddened to discover that many Aboriginal Australians drift through life, missing out on schools and jobs or any parts of modern life.  It’s even sadder to hear the way that white Australians have simply given up and don’t know what to do about it.  I almost wish Bryson had brought this more to the forefront of the book, rather than asking about it occasionally and being stymied, but I’m not sure what else he could have done, especially not if he aimed to keep the tone of the rest of the book light and funny as he did.

Anyway, I thought Down Under was an excellent read.  It certainly helped me get a broader picture of Australia and educated me in some senses at the same time.  I can’t wait to read more by Bill Bryson.

In the US, this book is titled In a Sunburned Country. I am an Amazon Associate. I borrowed this book from my local library.

John Sutherland grew up fatherless after his father died in an aviation accident while training for combat in World War II.  (Did you know they allowed a 5% mortality rate in training for war?  No?  I didn’t either.)  He grew up virtually motherless as well, since his mother was determined to live her life as she saw fit, whether that involved living in Argentina, sleeping with American soldiers, or leaving John to relatives on a regular basis.  Throughout his childhood, John sought refuge in one thing, books.  He lived and breathed the classics, ignoring his assigned work for his own personal choices.  When he got older, John also found solace in alcohol, and the two remained standbys for much of his life.

I’m a bit torn about this one.  I think I liked the concept more than the execution.  I love the idea of a memoir about someone’s life in books, and this one promised that books saved Sutherland’s life twice.  I didn’t really get much of that from the book, though, and overall it was much more just a life story than a life story in books.  There are plenty of literary references, sure, and he does mention what he’s reading at times, but I think the entire book was hampered by the fact that I didn’t find John’s life particularly interesting otherwise and, more importantly, I didn’t really like John.

I can’t understand the pain of growing up without a parent, much less the pain of growing up pretty much without either of them, so I can’t speak on personal experience.  I do think it’s understandable that he would struggle emotionally as a result.  But some of his attitudes just failed to match mine so spectacularly that it made it hard for me to relate to him.  As an example, John rarely read books for school on purpose.  He hated assigned reading so, even though he was perfectly capable of understanding assigned texts and doing really well in school, he generally performed poorly on pretty much every exam he was ever given.  This attitude follows him throughout his childhood, even though he must see that his grandparents and even his mother struggle along on a rock bottom basic education.  He has opportunities – his mother pays for him to go to great schools – and he just throws them away.  I’ve never really understood people who do this.

The worst part about it is that he then goes on to become a professor, just because there are so many positions and so few takers!  It seemed wrong to me that someone who mostly disdained school throughout his life can then go on to have the best job in the whole system.  I shouldn’t be so harsh, though, as people can change, and his eventual university education does leave a mark on him.  I could more easily understand his willingness to bury himself in drink, but I was glad when he gave it up.

The other big problem I had was with John’s mother, who I think was the reason in large part he struggled through childhood.  She more or less completely ignores him, pawning him off on relatives and friends, especially when she has a man around.  She pays his way through life but seems hardly ever emotionally invested; it’s clear that John adores her but that seems mostly based around her beauty and her determination to have her own way, even at the expense of his own happiness.  I can see that up to a point, but abandoning your child for three years while you go to live in Argentina?  I don’t see that so much.

What I did enjoy was the historical background and the brilliant depiction of Britain throughout John’s younger years.  He talks about things that were already disappearing, like quiet times fishing with his grandfather, and the history of Colchester (the town he mostly grows up in) and its schools.  He’s undoubtedly a very good writer and I think he could pull off a novel if he tried, especially if he set it in the places he knows best.

The Boy Who Loved Books definitely had issues, but Sutherland is a good writer.  If you can ignore the aspects I had problems with, I think this would be a good choice.

I am an Amazon Associate. I borrowed this book from my local library.