Notes from a Small Island
By Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson is what I was looking for , I am smitten after reading his excellent travelogue about Australia and was looking for more of his books. The fact that he is a very popular writer is clear from the fact that this book has 256 reviews on Amazon.com and believe me that is something !

If you have read any of his travelogues before you would know he has his own distinct style of humor and that is visible in every page in the book. It is his interactions with strangers and his descriptions of people that I like the most. He has the ability to bring out laugh out loud jokes in seemingly mundane everyday encounters.

Also he has a penchant for picking up details about history that you would not normally hear of from other sources or read in typical travelogues, stories like the a psycho duke who had a fear of people so severe that his servants would communicate with him in letters. Or the Crazy man on the train who bored him to death with details about Engines used in trains, their piston sizes , manufacturing sites, model year details and stuff like that. I especially loved a sentence where he says "and then the man took off to count rivets on trains". Another exceedingly humorous passage is when he describes in not so polite words the "Vodafone man" who makes pointless calls to tell people he’s on the mobile, on the train and will be home in so many minutes (1995: 187). There are many such funny / witty instances in the book like the time when Bryson was a journalist when Rupert Murdoch buys the company and the printers and typesetters go on strike. There are picketers everywhere blocking roads and terrorizing people and how Bryson barely manages to escape from being kicked in the ass by some picketers.

He did this journey throughout England primarily on public transport going to places with strange names that I have never heard of, most of which (place names) I managed to forget before turning the page. Well I must admit I know very little about places in England and of all he describes except for a few city names, Stonehenge was the only tourist place I was quite familiar with.

It is his idiosyncrasies that make the book interesting , this book does not have as much factual information or a lot of lasting value as a guide book but it is just one of those Non Fiction books that can be read once for a decent laugh. To say it shortly he sums it up as "British towns are a deck of cards that have been shuffled and endlessly redealt--same cards, different order." Throughout the book he complains consistently about bad architecture ruining the Victorian or traditional look and feel of the cities and when he complains he does not restrict himself to architecture, very often in a timely manner he has enough disdain for everyone right from public transport authorities, fast-food check out clerks, Ticketing clerks, to poor old men with hard hearing.

Overall I would read this book once and that would be it. It did fall short of my expectations in the sense that I am not a lot more knowledgeable about England having read this book unlike what happened before when I was enlightened with information about Australia last time. On the back cover of this book was a one line review that said "This book has as much Bill Bryson in it as much as it has England." I could not agree more.