Cofgod
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Australian Politics
Posts: 693
Bolton, Great Britain
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I'm reading a few books at the same time.
I'm reading the newest book by Bill Bryson, one of my favourite authors. He's an American Anglophile who has been living in Britain since the 1970s (except between 1995 and 2003 when he took his wife and kids to live in America). He has written travel books, in which he used to travel around countries and then write about the things he saw and the things which happened to him, which were often hilarious. His 1995 book "Notes from a Small Island" was about what happened when he toured the UK and some of the sights he saw in our cities, towns and quaint medieval villages. He has also written a book on his travels around Europe, one about his walks through America's Appalachian Mountains and another about his travels around Australia.
He has also written books about the English language and also an interesting book about science, "A Short History of Nearly Everything", which, when it was released in 2003, was one of the bestselling popular science books in the UK, selling over 300,000 copies.
His newest book which I'm reading now is callled "At Home: A Short History of Private Life" (2010). Bryson was struck by the thought that most history which is told is about the wars and battles which took place, whereas most history which actually happened is people going about their daily lives, eating, sleeping and working. So he decided to take a tour of his home, an old rectory in Wramplingham, Norfolk, and tell us the history of each of the rooms and some of the objects in them. So you learn how the hall originated (the term "chairman of the board" comes from the time when, in the great halls of medieval England, only the leader of the household sat on a chair when the occupants of the household sat around the table - or "board" - for their meal), the glorious history of the kitchen (in which he tells you the jobs which various servants did in the great households of England), the history of the garden, where you learn about great European gardeners such as Capability Brown. His tour of the bedroom is not one for the squeamish, where he tells us all about bedbugs and dust mites. He also tells you some interesting things about some of the grand houses of Britain and America and the some of the eccentric people who built them. He tells you the history of even some mundane things and makes it interesting. Sitting at his kitchen table one day, Bill Bryson wondered why, from a choice of hundreds of spices, we have settled on salt and pepper as our condiments of preference – why not salt and cardamom, he thought? For that matter, why do forks have four tines? And, come to that, why do we say 'room and board’ – what board are we talking about?
Bryson is also chancellor of Durham University (I think his favourite building in the world is the glorious Durham Cathedral in the same city as the university) and is eligible to take the British citizenship test, but has said he is "too cowardly" to take it.
For a more in-depth review, go here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/7740025/At-Home-A-Short-History-of-Private-Life-by-Bill-Bryson-review.html
Another book I'm reading is a book on British history, 55BC to 1945, but told in a slightly humorous way. I'm also reading a book called "Haunted Britain", which is a big hardback book. On each double spread there is a tale of one of Britain's ancient - and not so ancient - haunted buildings (such the the 13th century pub "Ye Olde Man and Scythe" in my town of Bolton, one of whose ghosts is of a English Civil War cavalier who was beheaded outside the pub in 1651 for his part in the Bolton Massacre, the axe and block used for the execution still kept in a glass cabinet in the pub today for the drinkers to see) and other places, telling you their history and the ghosts which supposedly haunt them, with loads of colour photos.
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