By Bill Bryson - At Home: A Short History of Private Life (12.2.2009)

Only Bill Bryson can set out to take us on a tour of an old English parsonage (vintage 1860ish) and end up giving us a two semester history course covering at least 4 centuries.

He takes each space in the house, begins by telling us how it was used, but then ventures off on a guided tour of

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everything remotely associated with that room. Hallways become an excuse to talk about building materials and techniques (brick making, concrete pouring), bathrooms yield us an entire story of man's dealings with human waste and the diseases that result from poor handling of same; bedrooms become the excuse for a story of man's attempts to live privately, kitchens give us lessons in cooking, utensils, fire and cooking methods as well as food preservation; sitting rooms give us the history of servants and their lives, etc.

At 512 page this qualifies as a clunkster, but a delightful one. Fortunately, it does not have to be read straight through. It is actually best read one chapter (and they're fairly lengthy ones) at a time, with another book in between. Altogether, when finished, the reader is certainly a more educated person, and has thousands of pieces of trivia to drop at one's next kiddie playdate, cocktail party, or at the family Thanksgiving table when Uncle Fred starts slobbering in the cranberry sauce.

I love Bill Bryson and this is one of his best.

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Bill Bryson lives in a house that was once a rectory, the home of the resident clergyman of a small English village. The central conceit of this book involves Bryson taking readers on a stroll through this house and using each room along the way as a jumping-off point to talk about all the history

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that went into making that room what it is. Although said history, it should probably be noted, is almost entirely that of the British Isles and America. Bryson also claims at the outset that he intends to focus mainly on the time since the rectory was first built, in 1851, but in practice, he rambles far and wide across across the past, touching on matters from the world-changing (e.g. the invention of the cotton gin and its impact on the American south) to the trivial (like the history of wigs as a men's fashion accessory).

Just as an example of how wonderfully wide-ranging and random this amble through history is, consider the chapter spent in the dining room, which features such topics as salt, scurvy, the spice trade, the many mistakes of Christopher Columbus, crops and diseases imported from the New World, Samuel Pepys' diary, the introduction of coffee and tea to Britain, the Boston Tea Party, the evolution of the fork, overcomplicated 19th century table settings, and why we no longer eat the heaviest meal of the day at lunch. And somehow, it all flows together in what seems like a perfectly natural progression.

It's all genuinely fascinating stuff, too, full of odd, quirky little details of the kind I never knew I wanted to know, related in an engaging style by a man who is clearly enjoying it all as much as I did.

Also, I have come away from this book with four main points in my mind, all of which are things I already knew, but which are certainly deserving of further consideration:

1. Everything really is connected to everything else, in all kinds of weird and wonderful ways.

2. I am deeply, incredibly, unbelievably grateful to live in the 21th century.

3. Very rich people have always done insanely, unconscionably wasteful things.

And 4. The Victorians were just plan weird.

Anyway. I definitely recommend this for even the most casual of armchair history buffs. Especially the ones who'd like to know something about the history of their armchairs.

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“Home” for Bryson, is a restored Victorian rectory, in the English countryside. Starting at the front door, he begins to give the history of each part of the house, (and a whole s**t load of other stuff), from front hallway to attic. It’s nearly an overwhelming barrage of information, but

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much of it is quite fascinating. I felt like I attended a couple different college courses. He will take you to prehistoric times, to the building of the Eiffel Tower, to Jefferson’s Monticello, to the 1st pull-chain toilet, (invented by Thomas Crapper), to bat guano, child labor abuses, corsets, powdered wigs and Roman baths. These just barely ripple the vast surface he covers.
Yes, this can cause some head-spinning and not everything works, at least not for me, but most of it I really enjoyed. I will close this out, with 2 important service announcements, I gleaned from this book: Be careful going down the stairs, especially navigating the 1st & last stair and please if nothing else, close the toilet lid before you flush. You do not want to know what expels into the air, if this is not performed. Ewwwwww…

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At around 500 pages, Bill Bryson's "At home a short history of private life" isn't short; the home it describes is Bryson's own Victorian mansion and not homes in general; the private lives mentioned are only those of the rich and the famous - and their servants and slaves. Furthermore, Bryson's

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history is heavily (almost totally) slanted towards Britons and Americans. Frenchmen mostly appear to serve as the butt of Bryson's cheap chauvinistic jokes. The final limitation of the book is its concentration on the Victorian house. The 20th century hardly makes an appearance. the book is a box of chocolates in the Forrest Gump definition: You never know what you get.

The book loosely follows Bryson on a tour of the different rooms of his Victorian mansion. Each chapter or room acts as a starting point for Bryson to string together different anecdotes, tidbits and vignettes about architecture, technology, society and culture. Many of these vignettes feature an all too familiar cast such as Samuel Pepys, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Jefferson. Bryson also lazily cribs some of his anecdotes from recent bestsellers and not their sources. Mixed with Bryson's familiar penchant for losing himself in interesting if odd tangents (such as the iceman Ötzi who lived and died decidedly not at home), this is an entertaining but forgettable pot-pourri for the attention deficit disorder crowds. Perfect airport reading matter.

I wish there were more books about our homes and how they influence our lives. Books that do not indulge in the Cribs effect of only visiting the rich and famous but all levels of human society, including for instance, George Orwell's memorable description of the miserable life of the boarding house in The Road to Wigan Pier or Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky's development of a practical kitchen for the masses. See Winifred Gallagher for an American take on 20th century houses, Witold Rybczynski's Home for a somewhat more philosophical-conceptual approach and Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language for descriptive patterns that make up a livable home (such as the genial "sunlight from two directions").

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Well,I couldn't finish this book which was very disappointing to me. I usually love Bill Bryson and his quirky humourous take on things but this book was neither quirky or humourous. It read like a history text book and I found I just couldn't keep going with it.

Bill Bryson is a great raconteur, whether writing about travel, language, science, or as in this case, history. He's affable, curious, and easy to read. This one is a history of private life as framed by the device of a chapter for each room in his English country house, a former parsonage.

We dip

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into the history of medicine, public health and sewerage; we visit the traders bringing spices back for the kitchen and exotic plants for the garden; we examine building materials and drainage and engineering; the concept of childhood; the impact of phylloxera; the fashion for wigs and tight trousers; the horrible life of domestic servants; and much more.

It's a cheerful ramble over the huge topic of how it's been to live life in different times in history, mostly in England. Full of interest; it's very engaging light reading. You could complain that it lacks depth, but that would be missing the point. There's an excellent bibliography if you want more on anything.

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Summary: Bill Bryson's latest book is, as the title promises, a history of the home and the contents therein. It's focused around the rectory in which he and his family currently live, and each chapter focuses on a different room, so the chapter on the dining room involves a history of eating

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customs, the bathroom is a history of sanitation, the dressing room a history of fashion, and so on. Although Bryson's goal was to "write a history of the world without leaving home", he mostly stays focused on the time - and country - in which his house was built, namely Victorian England, although he does look further back when the topic demands it. Rather than the big sweeping events of battles and politics, though, he focuses on the oft-forgotten side of history: the history of everyday life.

Review: I wasn't crazy about this book, although I think that was because there was a disconnect between what I was expecting and what this book actually delivered. Somewhere along the way - either from the book description or the back cover copy or in some dark recess of my own brain - I got the impression that this book was going to be a straight-up microhistory of the objects within a house, not of the house itself. To some extent, Bryson does provide this - we get the history of pepper shakers and wallpaper and windows and bathtubs. It's also mixed in with the history of some related topics outside the house, like the history of sewers and lawns and ice and kerosene. These things are presented with Bryson's usual rambling wit, packed with fascinating tidbits of trivia and useful bits of etymology. These things were all enjoyable, interesting, and why I picked up the book in the first place, and I'd say that they constituted maybe 1/2 to 2/3 of the book.

Unfortunately, the other 1/3 was more a history of the house itself - i.e. of architecture - and mini-biographies of architects. This fascinated me a lot less, and it was unfortunately concentrated towards the front of the book, which made it really hard to get into and pretty slow to get through. Architecture has never been a particular interest of mine, and Bryson's thesis for much of the book seemed to be "Hey, those dead rich white guys sure built some crazy big houses, huh?" A comparative element may have helped pique my interest, but Bryson's focus stays pretty narrowly on Britain (and occasionally the Colonies.)

Another part of the reason I struggled with this one is that I've got a terrible head for both names and dates. Particularly when peoples' stories are being told in two or three paragraphs or less, their names fall right out of my head, and when they got brought up again a hundred pages later, I could barely remember who they were, let alone place them in any meaningful context. Context was also an issue with the dates; some bouncing around through time is inevitable with history organized in this way. Ordinarily, that doesn't bother me too badly, but I had a hard time keeping the order of things straight, and thus no real feel for the big picture. For example, the Window Tax was discussed in one chapter, and the Brick Tax in another, but I couldn't keep straight which had happened first, and how it all related to the bricked-up windows you see in some British country houses. That's actually a good way of summarizing how I felt about the book as a whole: Bryson's great on the details, but it never really gelled into a cohesive whole for me... or, to put it in the language of the book, we've got all the rooms, but I still can't quite see the house. 3.5 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: This one will be good for people who like Bryson's style, as well as those who like Victorian literature, or novels set in 1800s Britain.

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Full of trivia and miscellany, weird and fascinating stories, and some very eccentric people, this is the Bill Bryson we know and love. This book was a delight to read. I should warn you though that it focuses mainly on Great Britain and the US, with only a little bit from other countries and

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hardly anything from non-Western nations.

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Readers who enjoyed Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" (in which he covered the world of science), are likely to be equally taken by "At Home: A Short History of Private Life" in which the author turns his attention to social history. At first glance, I feared that Bryson was

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going to do little more than wander from room to room of his home, explaining along the way the development of the form and function of each of the old house's rooms. This 19th century-built home, a former parsonage located in rural England, certainly lends itself to that type of discussion. Luckily, however, Bryson had much more in mind for "At Home."

The author does use each of the home's many rooms as fresh jumping-off points to turn his book in different directions. Some of the book's chapters are specific to the particular rooms from which the author speaks, while others only begin in the room in which the reader finds himself figuratively standing. This device allows Bryson to relate some rather fascinating, and often shocking, social history in the witty style his readers have so much come to appreciate.

Many, if not most, readers will be surprised to learn that only in relatively recent times did houses develop into the style we live in today. Humans, for multiple reasons, were slow to adapt their dwellings into something offering much more comfort than was found sleeping outside. Bryson points out that much can be learned about social mores from the way rooms of the house were given over to special uses. That bedrooms and bathrooms, for instance, were two of the last rooms to evolve for special usage, reveals much about the accepted privacy standards of the day. Making love and bathing were not always activities that people expected to do in complete privacy - for practical reasons involving limited space, large families, communal dining, and limited wealth.

Perhaps it is just me, but I found the pages about the problem of disposing of human excrement in large cities to be particularly intriguing. We are all familiar with the notion that chamber pots were often dumped into the streets from upstairs windows. But I am willing to bet that most of us never considered that a cellar could be filled with human waste up to a depth of six feet or that the space behind a home could be two feet deep in the same product. What Bryson describes is appalling and says much about how desperate people had to be to choose city life over a life in which one did not have to wade through excrement of all varieties on a daily basis.

Bryson has great fun in describing the evolution of male and female fashion. Some of what he describes from prior centuries even mirrors the "reasoning" behind some of today's more ludicrous fashion statements - and the slavish way that people follow hot trends. Wigs for men, of the type still worn in British courtrooms, were such a popular status symbol when first introduced that men were actually shaving their own hair off and replacing it with the obviously expensive (and exclusive) new head gear. That their own hair often looked nicer than the wigs they could afford, did not bother these men. It was all about displaying their wealth and status.

"At Home" is an interesting and fun look at the societal evolution of much of the Western World. That Bill Bryson infuses the facts with his own brand of humor, makes it all more fun than it would have been if written as straight history. This is a trivia-collector's delight.

Rated at: 4.0

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Another compendium of witty, informative, random and generally quite interesting facts and potted histories from the trivia collector's friend. After tackling the universe, Bill Bryson decided to 'write a history of the world without leaving home', by researching the various uses and contents of

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the rooms in his Victorian house. Within that seemingly narrow scope of kitchens, bedrooms and gardens, Bryson manages to cannily work in archaeology and architecture, farming and fashion, birth and death, and everything from the London sewers to the Eiffel Tower, all in his own inimitable, straightforward and yet entertaining style.

Using the plans for his Norfolk rectory, built in 1851, Bryson moves from room to room, encompassing the history and development of house and home, from the archaeological discovery of Skara Brae in the Orkneys to the invention of the telephone. Some chapter topics are fairly obvious - the kitchen and dining room cover food and farming, the fusebox is about lighting and power, Capability Brown features in the garden, and children in the nursery - but others are quite inventive and surprising. The cellar is a history of building materials; the passage details the invention of the telephone via the construction of the Eiffel Tower and the 'Gilded Age' of America; the study is concerned with mice, bedbugs and other infestations; the 'plum room' (so termed by Bryson because the walls were painted a plum colour) describes the contributions to architecture of Palladio, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington; and the stairs warn of dangers in the home. Bryson also shoehorns servants into the scullery, surgery and mortality into the bedroom, disease and sewerage in the bathroom, fashion and the Industrial Revolution in the dressing room, child labour and poverty into the nursery, and conservation of country houses into the attic.

I can't even begin to describe how fascinating I found this book, but anyone who has read Bryson before will know how accessible he can make even the driest topics. Archaeology is usually of absolutely no interest to me, but Bryson's recounting of the haphazard handling of the Skara Brae site really captured my attention. Biographies of history's remarkable inventors, designers and artisans were similarly impressive, such as Paxton and Bazalgette, Chippendale and Edison, Jefferson (I need to read more about him!), and John and Jane Loudon, who brought gardening to the masses. Luckily, Bryson also includes a bibliography for whetted appetites, and an index for future reference.

A must for any bookshelf, whether in the library, drawing room, hall or bedroom!

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'Charming emphasis on pointless detail'

That's how he described an entry in a dictionary, but it's also a perfect label for this book.

The story is loosely draped over a walk through his house, an old rectory in Yorkshire, and he uses a few points in the history of the house to hang up an otherwise

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very loose thread of 'home improvements' over the ages.

True to form Bryson seems to have done his research, but occasionally he burrows too deep into 'pointless detail'.

I listened to an audio version, narrated by the author, and while there's nothing bad per se about his voice, Brysons main strength is the pen and not the tongue.

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Bryson is one of my favorites. His meandering, conversational is exactly how I like to learn history. Ostensibly a book of the history of the various parts of the house--living room, stairs, kitchen, and so on--Bryson weaves together changes in architecture, advances in engineering, shifts in

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social classes and the status of women, national trade relations, developments in cookery, and many many many other fascinating threads.

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In this latest book, Bill Bryson takes a close look at the history of something we all take for granted: our homes. When Bryson bought an old rectory for his home upon returning to England, he began to wonder why it was laid out the way it was. For example, why is the kitchen was at one end of the

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house and the dining room at the other. Characteristically of Bill Bryson, a question like that leads to a research project. Like his other books, he provides a brilliant insight into questions I’ve always contemplated, but hadn’t put into words.

Bryson takes his home apart, room by room, and discovers the origin. He begins, naturally, at the very first houses and investigates what each room was used for, how they evolved over the years and the history of the world along the same time. He talks about building materials, lay outs, why certain rooms were put next to each other and why others were put at opposite ends.

He studies the people that lived in the houses, too. Explanations of the people who owned the houses are told right along side the servants, those who really ran the house. I found this explanation most enlightening. It was horrid work to run a house in the era before electricity. Servants worked 18 to 20 hours days to keep everything perfect for their wealthier masters. The worst task had to have been the endless hauling of water to all points of the house, several times each day. I can’t imagine the effort involved for the servants should the lady of the house decide to take a bath. First the water had to be drawn from the well to the fire to be heated. Then it had to be hauled up the steep back stairs to the mistresses bath. It had to be kept the correct temperature. Once the bath was complete, the water had to be hauled back down again. The request for a bath could easily create several hours of work for someone else.

From the vantage point of where we are in history, it is hard to remember most labor saving devices at home have come along in just the last 50 to 100 years. I can remember growing up in a house without a dishwasher. Most people wouldn’t consider it a luxury appliance anymore. Plumbing, electricity, vacuums, stoves, refrigerators and even closets are such wonderful improvements that didn’t exist until recently. The notion of living without them is now a hobby called camping.

Bryson, with his usual quick wit, tells story after story of the evolution of the way we live. It is a lively and fascinating narrative that only bogs down in a few places. The breadth of Western civilization history he covers in commendable. Tying it all back to his house, room by room, is very novel. I thoroughly enjoyed my education. I will no doubt revisit this book again, as I found it fascinating and engaging. After enjoying A Short History of Nearly Everything, I can hardly wait to see the next topic Bryson decides to take on. Few people can get away taking on such a large subject, covering it completely and keeping the reader from falling asleep. Well done, Mr. Bryson!

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It's a while since Bill Bryson has written a travel book, but he certainly wanders far and wide with this one, though he never leaves his own house.

The answer to this paradox is in the structure of the book. Bryson packages his short history of private life into a sort of rambling tour around the

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rooms of his home, a mid 19th Century former Church of England rectory in a Norfolk village. (This American writer has lived for many years in England.) He uses the function or former function of each room, or sometimes its contents, as his starting-point for a wide-ranging, leisurely and digressive examination of the way our domestic lives have been shaped by innovators of the past. Many of those had enough idiosyncracies and obsessions for our guide to spin humour from, in much the same way he does with characters he meets along the way in his travelogues. Here he is not taking us along the Appalachian Trail or for a walk in the woods, but across time and continents, drifting pleasurably, with occasional swoops and dives, so that we feel sometimes like the boy being taken for a magic ride by the Snowman, where walls are no barrier and there's no particular schedule to worry about.

And that's the feel of the book - an engaging adventure, a fun exploration in the company of an amiable, cherubic narrator - if not the Snowman perhaps a jolly, anecdotal uncle. Don't look for structured history in Bryson's work, still less for philosophy, as some reviewers seem to have expected and been disappointed not to find - these are not Bryson's style. He's a dipper-in, a snapper-up of trifles, a jackdaw for twinkling facts.

The only further gem it would be a delight to have seen revealed by the author as he guides us through his home would concern the daily detail of his own living there, and his family's, but he keeps that particular private life out of these pages, and we can't really blame him for that in these prying days.

The tour through the house is anyway nothing more than a convenient device, and Bryson cheerfully drops it in several places when he can't map out a starting-point for what he wants to include precisely from the room we are in.

The whole tour is so discursive that I get the feeling he could have taken us back to the beginning and started again with a whole different set of interesting things to say. I'd happily sign up for that tour too; Bill Bryson is very good company.

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I revisited my old friend Bill in this book and he chatted away as usual, half professor and half clown, and, like anybody’s favorite uncle who is the family raconteur, he does “go on a bit” but as everyone says afterwards – he is such a card!

The reason for my re-reading was a recall of

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one delightful mind-picture he drew – I had run out of tissues and went to the top drawer where we used to keep handkerchiefs – and recalled why we had put them away. Bryson describes the Native Indians whooping and hollering with glee when they saw the Pilgrim Fathers blew lustily into a dainty hanky then carefully fold it up and put it away back into their pockets. “Just as though it were treasured” he says.

Other aspects of personal hygiene are treated amusingly too in this delightful read – a trip through history (mainly British) craftily based on wandering from room to room of the 18th century parsonage he lives in whilst describing any item that catches his interest – one of Bryson’s historical and hysterical world tours but this time, he says, undertaken in his “carpet slippers”.

An excellent ‘dipping book’ or an engrossing straight read for a history buff, either way, a rewarding book. Thank you Uncle Bill!

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Did you know the word vicar comes from the word vicarious? Or that the reverend who wrote the hymn “Onward Christian Soldier” also wrote the first novel featuring a werewolf? What about the phrase room and board, any idea where that came from? After reading At Home you’ll brain will be packed

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full of trivia about houses and everything connected to them.

Bill Bryson has an incredible skill for taking the most random and mundane topics and making them enthralling. This is technically a “history of private lives” but that covers a lot of ground.

“If you had to summarize it in a sentence, you could say that the history of private life is a history of getting comfortable slowly.”

From the bathroom to the living room, we make our way through modern rooms learning why salt and pepper are the most common spices and that women had a really hard time getting care from doctors in the past. Also, make sure your wallpaper isn’t colored by arsenic!

This book covers so much more than the “home.” It explores how humanity has changed over the centuries, adjusting our domiciles as we change our habits. It shows how we use those homes to interact with the world and to retreat from it.

Bryson goes on to details the world of furniture and meals and social interactions in a way that is surprisingly engrossing. I honestly wondered how he could get a whole book out of life “at home” but he delves into the details of our endless search for comfort with such infectious enthusiasm. I found myself laughing out loud as I listened to it. I would definitely suggest getting your hands on the audiobook, which he reads himself. His dry sense of humor is best translated when you hear it from his own lips.

BOTTOM LINE: One of my favorite Bryson books! I felt like I learned so much and just when a topic started to get the tiniest bit tired he moved on to the next subject. If you’re a fan of nonfiction with a touch of humor and sarcasm (think Mary Roach or Sarah Vowell) I would highly recommend.

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At Home is an absolutely fascinating narrative, in a cast of 100s (thousands?) Bryson magically retells some of the most interesting stories of history in short vinaigrettes. Hardly a page went by that didn't have a books worth of interesting material to further investigate. There have been other

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histories of "Private Life" but probably none as entertaining, wide reaching and personally affecting. Just about everything about the modern home and lifestyle - short of clothes, stairs and a few other ancient relics - are inventions of the past 200 years or so. The 19th century in particular saw an amazing amount of change. If Bryson's book has any lesson for the present, it's that the future will no doubt be very different.

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Bill Bryson travels through his English home and uses it as a launching point for this history of the uses of the rooms and the types of things one finds in each spot. It's something of a cluttered attic of a book (pun intended) with little bits of cultural history, material culture, architecture,

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and all sorts of odds and ends. To be honest I listened to some of the audio discs out of order and didn't realize it at first, so linearity is not important to this work. While focusing on the broad topic of the home and private life, the focus of the book tends to stick with British and American history, and while some examples go back to Classical times most of the book is set in the past three centuries with the Victorian Era being Bryson's favorite. It's a nice bit of compiled history told with Bryson's usual wit and insight, although surprisingly his own voice is not as prevalent in this intimate book as it is in his other works.

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Like a congenial ramble through Wikipedia, minus Jimmy Wales glamour shots. The conceit of a history of homes and households is sometimes barely even that. A little unfocused (despite being very Western, nay, British-centric) and even repetitive at times, but still charming and worth the read.

Having written an enormous "History of Nearly Everything," non-fiction maestro has written a new book by walking around his house and wondering how it came to be the way it is. This allows him to venture all through history for interesting facts and stories; all discoveries, social movements,

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calamities and works of nature have left their mark on human dwellings. Bryson excels at giving the reader a mountain of information while remaining a very entertaining fellow. A chapter about rats, mice and other things that share our houses (dust mites! ack!) will creep you the hell out. You'll learn just how miserable was the lot of the average domestic servant, even just a hundred years ago. You'll find out how historically new is the very IDEA of domestic comfort, and you'll be grateful to be alive now, not back in the days of common halls and coal soot that blackened the London air even in daytime. Highly recommended.

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I highly recommend Bill Bryson's "At Home." It's a fascinating history of everything that goes into a home -- why do houses include the rooms they do? Where did glass come from? How did people get through the night before electricity was invented? How were plumbing and sewer systems developed? If

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it sounds dry, it's not -- it's extremely interesting and Bryson is his usual funny self, though not as hysterical as he's been in some of his more personal books. The part about pre-anesthesia surgery will horrify you, the section on building the Eiffel Tower will fascinate, the history of outlandish fashions will make you laugh out loud. How are those things connected to houses? Though he goes far afield, it all comes back to the particular room of the house he's writing about in that moment, and it's all very engaging.

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Bill Bryson generally does not disappoint. Living in a 16th century English Abbey, Bryson was curious as to the origins of the different rooms in a typical home. Through his pondering, there were tid-bits of society, culture, invention and necessity woven throughout. Some of the characters and

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stories that Bryson uncovered through his research were thrilling while at other times there were tangents where all I was thinking was "Aristocratic snore". A little more editing to take the seemingly irrelevant, boring and long-winded stories out and this book would have been absolutely perfect.

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I'm a long time fan of Bill Bryson. I jumped at the chance to read his newest book At Home.

The premise for the book was fascinating. Bryson lives in a Victorian parsonage in a quiet part of England. He decided to go room by room and write about the history and impact on personal lives. So, for

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example the bedroom investigates sex, death, sleep, the bathroom - hygiene, the nursery- children's lives, the kitchen provides a wealth of subject matter. Indeed Bryson covers 17 different areas of his home, including the attic, stairs, the fuse box, the garden and many more. But if you think it's just household minutiae, you're mistaken. The narrative begins in the house buts slips out on tangents to encompass a much broader picture and then comes back full circle.

I loved At Home. It's not a book to be devoured, but rather slowly sipped and enjoyed. Bryson's investigative skills combined with his talent for turning those facts into absolutely captivating anecdotes made this a truly enjoyable read. I love British history and At Home was an entertaining account told in a totally unique manner.

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This is one of those books that fills all the empty spaces in my brain that used to hold phone numbers. Some parts are more dry than others, but I learned a lot of things. I think there’s a little bit of something here for everyone. If furniture and clothing aren’t your thing, maybe

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architecture and gardens are. Did you know that the color of your wallpaper used to be a sign of how well-off you were? And that some of those colors could then make you sick? Or why Chippendale furniture is so special? Or why brick has gone in and out of fashion as a building material? And why do we eat the meals we do at the time of day we eat them? Maybe I’m a nerd, but I find a lot of this stuff is really interesting. This isn’t as humorous as some of Bryson’s other books, but you still know it’s him.

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