{"id":296,"date":"2011-05-26T01:04:32","date_gmt":"2011-05-26T01:04:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelwagstaff.wordpress.com\/?p=296"},"modified":"2016-11-02T20:56:19","modified_gmt":"2016-11-02T20:56:19","slug":"bill-bryson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelwagstaff.info\/wordpress\/bill-bryson\/","title":{"rendered":"Bill Bryson"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is an odd choice, admittedly, for the Favorite Artists series I’ve started here on this blog. It’s not much of a series yet, to be honest, since I’ve only featured<\/a> one other artist so far, documentary poet Mark Nowak. And Bill Bryson, while a cracking writer of popular non-fiction, isn’t exactly what many people would call an ‘artist.’ As proof that I’m casting a wide net in my use of the word ‘artist’, here’s the next entry in the series, a brief feature on the best-selling author Bill Bryson<\/a>, OBE<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Bill Bryson, at home in the North of England<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Bryson was born in Iowa and attended college at Drake University<\/a> (where my cousin Rick earned his law degree)\u00a0in Des Moines for a few years \u00a0before dropping out to backpack across Europe. He got a job in the UK, met his wife in Surrey, and they briefly returned to the States, where Bryson finished his undergraduate degree. He then moved to North Yorkshire (he lived in Malham<\/a>, a lovely village in the Yorkshire Dales) where he worked as a journalist for more than a decade. In the late 80s he left journalism to write independently, in 1995 he moved back to the United States and in 2003 he returned to England, just around the time that I was leaving the country after completing my mission for the LDS church. It was actually in Yorkshire that I first heard about Bryson. I was shopping for groceries at an ASDA (a Walmart subsidiary and large supermarket\/grocery chain in the UK) in Barnsley\u00a0when I saw a copy of what was then his most recent book: A Short History of Nearly Everything<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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Front cover of the UK edition of A Short History of Nearly Everything<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At the time, I wasn’t permitted to read anything outside of what was known as the “missionary library”, which was comprised of the standard works of the LDS church, official church publications, and a small list of semi-canonical books (very safe, tame stuff, the most intellectually engaging of which were former LDS Apostle James Talmage’s Articles of Faith <\/em>and Jesus the Christ<\/em>). I was (and am) a voracious reader, and this restriction was difficult for me to abide, but for two years, I did my best to obey the constraints, though I was nearly always hungry for good literature (especially poetry) and intelligent creative non-fiction. On that particular Monday in ASDA, Bryson’s book caught my eye, and I remember taking it off the shelf to skim the dust jacket. I was carefully not to actually read the book, but I remember thinking that they book definitely looked like something I’d want to read when I again had the liberty to do so (however, I was so starved for interesting reading material that I probably would have felt this way about just about anything). I wheeled my cart of groceries to the checkout, paid for them, and promptly forgot all about the book.<\/p>\n

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Front cover of the US edition of A Short History of Nearly Everything<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A few years later, after finishing my undergraduate degree and just before coming to Madison to start working on a Ph.D. in English, I was working as a land surveyor in Boise, Idaho. I had evenings and weekends off, which meant I had a lot of time to read. I started going to a small branch of the Boise Public Library! (more on the exclamation mark in a future post) just inside the Boise Mall a couple of times a week to find interesting books. One week, I saw a copy of A Short History of Nearly Everything<\/em>. Even though the US edition came equipped with a different cover, the name clicked and I checked out the book. It was a fantastic book, that rarest of things, a lucid, readable, but eminently intelligent introduction to just about every branch of science currently practiced in the West. Bryson is one of the best popularizers of detailed, scholarly knowledge that I know, and in many ways reminds me stylistically of Michael Pollan, in that both have a sharp eye for compelling, engaging narrative supported by a broad range of relevant information. In both cases, I come away feeling like I’m reading someone who has engaged with and synthesized a vast amount of detailed scholarly information, who is immensely learned and widely read, but who is capable of mastering their material rather than letting their material master them. It’s really a treat to read writers who can tell captivating stories while simultaneously summarizing a vast body of richly detailed information in a style that is both inviting and accessible. A Short History of Nearly Everything <\/em>was\u00a0the best thing I read that whole year summer, and when I finished it I decided to dig in to other books by Bryson.<\/p>\n

I got a copy of his book about trekking the Appalachian Trail,\u00a0A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail <\/em>on CD from the library, and starting playing the discs on the drive to and from work. Withing a couple of weeks it became the first (and only) book I’ve ever listened to from beginning to end on compact discs. I liked the book, but didn’t rate it as highly as A Short History<\/em>, and so was a little less enthusiastic when it came to the rest of his back catalog. I decided to skip his travel writing (In A Sunburned Country<\/em>)\u00a0and his notes on American culture\u00a0\u00a0started his memoir (I’m a Stranger Here Myself<\/em>, which actually looks quite interesting)<\/em>, but did check out his memoir:\u00a0The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid<\/em>, but I was reading about 6 other books at the time, and I ended up moving before I finished it. I found the ‘book trailer’ for this book to give you a taste for what it was like.<\/p>\n