Bill Bryson

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Sounds as if more or less all of us agree that his non-autobiographical work is better than his comic travelogues, probably better also than his childhood autobiography (although the anecdote from that about his Dad letting him and his sibling ride on the outside of the truck on the highway has one of the best punchlines I've ever read). I'm pretty sure I've read his entire body of published work and I certainly feel that way. Also, I share the common experience of posters on this thread of not finding his travel stuff anywhere near as funny as I used to. I was very disappointed by "The Road to Little Dribbling", based on recalling how much I'd enjoyed NFASI, and my reaction was "oh, that's a poor shadow of NFASI", but it occurs to me now that maybe the real explanation is largely that NFASI wasn't as funny or as good as I'd thought back in the mid 90s.

[Benjm]

I watched the film of A Walk In The Woods last night. I don't know what Bryson thought of the adaptation but, as portrayed by Robert Redford, he comes across as a charmless, self-absorbed prick, without any indication that this was the film makers' intention. Likewise some fairly unpleasant jokes at the expense of supposedly unattractive women didn't seem to be inviting the viewer's disapproval.

[G-Man]

His research stuff is almost invariably excellent — 1927 is even masterfully crafted — and I don't mind admitting that Bryson has influenced some of my writing. But The Road To Little Dribbling was just dreadful. Bryson sounded like the Brexiteer I assume he isn't. The other day I took the Australia book off the shelf with the intention of reading it again. I looked at it, and and then put it back, because reading it again might disabuse me of the idea that it is one of the funniest travel books I've read.

His latest effort, The Body: A Guide for Occupants, is perfectly competent, with some of those great reveals of amazing trivia and sidetracks that are Bryson's specialty. But I don't think I'll keep my copy. A second-hand shop will be grateful for it (alongside Louis Theroux's tedious autobiography)

[Various Artist]

Also, I share the common experience of posters on this thread of not finding his travel stuff anywhere near as funny as I used to. I was very disappointed by "The Road to Little Dribbling", based on recalling how much I'd enjoyed NFASI, and my reaction was "oh, that's a poor shadow of NFASI"

I've not read any of his books in a long time but have listened to Bryson interviews on numerous podcasts in the last few years as he's always an interesting guest.

The first one of those was the Penguin Podcast^{(Penguin Books, not the birds)}, when he was interviewed in front of a live audience by Richard E Grant to coincide with the release of The Road to Little Dribbling – and one thing that struck me quite forcefully from listening to Bill's comments on writing that book was that he didn't really want to do it.
It was clearly something the publishers thought up just because it was 20 years since Notes From a Small Island, but he himself was saying how irrelevant it was in a sense because he didn't have that process of discovery that the likes of Small Island, Down Under, and his early travel books were. Having lived in Britain off and mostly on for 40-odd years, it wasn't like he could be surprised by, say, Grimsby anymore, because either from personal experience or cultural osmosis he already has an impression of what just about everywhere in this country is like by now – so, as he put it, he could basically have written it without leaving the house. I'd already bought a copy, but as a result of hearing that, coupled with some other lukewarm reviews of the time, I've never actually got around to opening it.

He fairly evidently recognises how much of a stranger his younger self is to himself (to paraphrase the American title of Notes From a Big Country) at this stage, too – it's now longer since The Last Continent was written than it was then since the 1950s that he harked back to on that trip, and so the book is now a time capsule within a time capsule: not just a tale of how America has changed so unrecognisably since the 1950s and 1960s, but how it (and he) has changed since the late 1980s when he wrote it. He doesn't seem especially proud of his attitudes back when he was writing those first couple of books, but that's perhaps inevitable when he was a 30-something then and pushing 70 now.

[G-Man]

Well, that explains why "Dribbling" was such a disapointing book. He should have done a book on Southern Africa. There is so much he could have riffed on, and so much unexpected history of civilisations the colonialists destroyed, in fact and in memory. That could do with the Bryson treatment.

[Various Artist]

He did talk about that sort of idea, tangentially, in the same podcast, on the subject of his short volume African Diary, which describes a trip he did to Kenya 20 or so years back. He was saying, because he's first and foremost a humorist, the important thing is not to be punching downward when you're being humorous about the subject. So he's not worried about writing that sort of book about Britain or America or Australia, and he'd be very happy to do a travelogue in Canada, for instance, as these are nations big and ugly enough to put up with it, so to speak. But he'd be very lairy about doing one like that in Africa as he wouldn't feel it fair; he commented how in his Diary you could notice it swiftly becomes hard for him to write much, because there simply wasn't much to be funny about. (He was visiting poverty-relief projects under the auspices of the charity to whom the book royalties have gone.)

So given the painful history and the sensitivities involved, I imagine he wouldn't want to write a 'conventional' Bryson travelogue on Southern Africa on that sort of basis. I could see it lending itself to the more 'serious' approach he's taken with the likes of ...Nearly Everything, At Home or The Body, though, perhaps.

[G-Man]

He'd navigate that. In fact, by treating Africa nit as a sad basketcase but as a culturally diverse, vibrant, beautiful and quirky place, he'd help change perceptions.