Library's review
If you do, you will love this tale of Bryson's journey around Britain, visiting bustling metropolitan areas, derelict seaside resorts, and beautiful and lively villages. And you won't mind that
If you don't like or perhaps have had your fill of grumpy old men, you will still find a lot to like in this travel guide but you will occasionally find yourself speaking sharply out loud to the author: "Get over it, Bill!" As long as you are reading in private, you should be fine.
More than anything, this book made me long to take a trip to Britain and poke around all the lovely places that Bryson gushes over. He makes a point to not simply retrace the roads he traveled in his first British travelogue, [Notes From a Small Island], which I adored and as far as I can remember was filled with sarcasm but not quite as much railing against modernity. Even with the ranting and raving, Bill Bryson is a first-rate storyteller and he clearly loves his adopted country despite its flaws. You could do worse for a traveling companion.
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Description
"Twenty years ago, Bill Bryson went on a trip around Britain to discover and celebrate that green and pleasant land. The result was Notes from a Small Island, a true classic and one of the bestselling travel books ever written. Now he has traveled about Britain again, by bus and train and rental car and on foot, to see what has changed--and what hasn't. Following a route he dubs the Bryson Line, from Bognor Regis in the south to Cape Wrath in the north, by way of places few travelers ever get to at all, Bryson rediscovers the wondrously beautiful, magnificently eccentric, endearingly singular country that he both celebrates and, when called for, twits. With his matchless instinct for the funniest and quirkiest and his unerring eye for the idiotic, the bewildering, the appealing, and the ridiculous, he offers acute and perceptive insights into all that is best and worst about Britain today."--From book jacket.… (more)