The good with the bad

Born in Iowa, Bill Bryson has spent most of his life in Great Britain. He met and married an English woman on a visit and stayed. In the early  1990s, he and his wife decided to move to the United States for a time to give their children a chance to experience life in another country. Before he went, however, Bryson took a goodbye tour of Great Britain, and the result was Notes from a Small Island (1992).

Readers of Bryson's other travel books will know what to expect: rapture and ridicule, delight and disgust, the good and the bad alternating each step along the way. Everything is described in hilarious detail, but the bad is always much funnier than the good.

He writes a lot about architecture. Bradford's role in life, he says, is "to make every place else in the world look better in comparison." Two new buildings in Inverness he calls "two piles of heartbreak." He has nothing good to say about the British habit of tearing down beautiful old buildings to construct modern monstrosities.

He describes a certain castle as "everyone's favorite ruin after Princess Margaret." He calls Liverpool "a festival of litter." He hates the metal chairs now found in so many beautiful English cathedrals.

He often pans the places where he stays and the restaurants where he eats. He discusses hotel dining rooms where you get "three courses of pompous description and overcooked disappointment."

One of the highlights of his tour, and there are many more than I am suggesting here, is the chance to see This Is Cinerama once again. This movie extravangza, which introduced the short-lived Cinerama films, delighted him when he was a boy back in the 1950s, and is shown, or at least was shown at this time, on a regular basis in an otherwise unimpressive British town. Bryson visited just to see the movie again and was not disappointed.

His book, though now decades old, does not disappoint either.