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The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain Kindle Edition
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 (but not too closely) 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.
Nothing is more entertaining than Bill Bryson on the road—and on a tear. The Road to Little Dribbling reaffirms his stature as a master of the travel narrative—and a really, really funny guy.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAnchor
- Publication dateJanuary 19, 2016
- File size8840 KB
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Review
"Although he's now entering what he fondly calls his 'dotage,' the 64-year-old Bryson seems merely to have sharpened both his charms and his crotchets. As the title of The Road to Little Dribbling suggests, he remains devoted to Britain's eccentric place names as well as its eccentric pastimes."
—Alida Becker, The New York Times Book Review
"[Y]ou could hardly ask for a better guide to Great Britain than Bill Bryson. Bryson’s new book is in most ways a worthy successor and sequel to his classic Notes From A Small Island. Like its predecessor, The Road to Little Dribbling is a travel memoir, combining adventures and observations from his travels around the island nation with recounting of his life there, off and mostly on, over the last four decades. Bryson is such a good writer that even if you don’t especially go in for travel books, he makes reading this book worthwhile."
—Nancy Klingener, Miami Herald
"...Bryson’s capacity for wonder at the beauty of his adopted homeland seems to have only grown with time.... Britain is still his home four decades later, a period in which he went from lowly scribe at small-town British papers to best-selling travel writer. But he retains an outsider’s appreciation for a country that first struck him as 'wholly strange ... and yet somehow marvelous.”
—Griff Witte, Washington Post
“Such a pleasure to once again travel the lanes and walking paths of Britain in the company of Bill Bryson! He’s a little older now, and not necessarily wiser, but he’s as delightful and irascible a guide as anyone could ever wish to have, as he rediscovers this somewhat careworn land and finds it as endearing (mostly) as ever. It’s a rare book that will make me laugh out loud. This one did, over and over.”
—Erik Larson, author of Dead Wake and The Devil in the White City
"There’s a whole lot of “went to a charming little village named Bloke-on-Weed, had a look around, a cupof tea, and moved on” in Bryson’s most recent toddle around Britain. Writing 20 years after his bestselling Notes from a Small Island, Bryson concocts another trip through his homeland of 40 years bydetermining the longest distance one could travel in Britain in a straight line... This being Bryson, one chuckles every couple of pages, of course, saying, 'yup, that sounds about right,' to his curmudgeonly commentary on everything from excess traffic and litter to rude sales clerks. One also feels the thrum of wanderlust as Bryson encounters another gem of a town or pip of a pub. And therein lies the charm of armchair traveling with Bryson. He clearly adores his adopted country. There are no better views, finer hikes, more glorious castles, or statelier grounds than the ones he finds, and Bryson takes readers on a lark of a walk across this small island with megamagnetism."
—Booklist, starred review
"Fans should expect to chuckle, snort, snigger, grunt, laugh out loud and shake with recognition…a clotted cream and homemade jam scone of a treat."
—Sunday Times
"At its best as the history of a love affair, the very special relationship between Bryson and Britain. We remain lucky to have him."
—Matthew Engel, Financial Times
"Is it the funniest travel book I’ve read all year? Of course it is."
—Daily Telegraph
"We have a tradition in this country of literary teddy bears—John Betjeman and Alan Bennett among them—whose cutting critiques of the absurdities and hypocrisies of the British people are carried out with such wit and good humour that they become national treasures. Bill Bryson is American but is now firmly established in the British teddy bear pantheon... The fact that this wonderful writer can unerringly catalogue all our faults and is still happy to put up with us should make every British reader’s chest swell with pride."
—Jake Kerridge, Sunday Express
"The truly great thing about Bryson is that he really cares and is insanely curious... Reading his work is like going on holiday with the members of Monty Python."
—Chris Taylor, Mashable
"There were moments when I snorted out loud with laughter while reading this book in public... He can be as gloriously silly as ever."
—The London Times
"The observation, the wit, the geniality of Bryson’s inimitable words illuminate ever chapter."
—Terry Wogan, Irish Times
"Everybody loves Bill Bryson, don’t they? He’s clever, witty, entertaining, a great companion... his research is on show here, producing insight, wisdom and startling nuggets of information... Bill Bryson and his new book are the dog’s bollocks."
—Independent on Sunday
"Stuffed with eye-opening facts and statistics..... Bryson's charm and wit continue to float off the page....Recognising oneself is part of the pleasure of reading Bryson's mostly affable rants about Britain and Britishness."
—Daily Mail
"His millions of readers will probably enjoy this just as much as its predecessor."
—Observer
"We go to him less for insights—though there are plenty of these—and more for the pleasure of his company. And he can be very funny indeed. Almost every page has a line worth quoting."
—Glasgow Herald
"At last, Bill Bryson has got back to what he does best—penning travel books that educate, inform and will have you laughing out loud... I was chuckling away by page four and soaking up his historic facts to impress my mates with. Sure to be a bestseller."
—Sun
"Bryson has no equal. He combines the charm and humour of Michael Palin with the cantankerousness of Victor Meldrew and the result is a benign intolerance that makes for a gloriously funny read."
—Daily Express
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
BUGGER BOGNOR!
My plan, after Bognor, was to take a bus along the coast to Brighton, and I was quietly excited about this. I had never experienced this stretch of coastline and had great hopes for it. I had printed out a timetable and carefully selected the 12.19 as the best bus for my purposes, but as I ambled to the bus stop now, thinking I had minutes to spare, I watched in mild dismay as my bus departed just ahead of a cloud of black smoke. It took me a minute to work out that my watch was not right, that the battery was evidently dying. With a half-hour to kill till the next bus, I went into a jeweller’s shop, where a cheerless man looked at the watch and told me that a replacement battery would be £30.
‘But I barely paid that for the watch,’ I sputtered.
‘That may explain why it’s not working,’ he said and handed it back with a look of majestic indifference.
I waited to see if he had anything more to say, if there existed within him the faintest flicker of interest in helping me to get the right time on my wrist and possibly in the process keep his business going. It appeared not.
‘Well, I’ll leave it for now,’ I said. ‘I can see you are very busy.’ If he had any appreciation for my instinct for mirth, he failed
to show it. He gave a shrug and that was the end of our relationship.
I was hungry, but now had only twenty minutes before the next bus, so I went into a McDonald’s for the sake of haste. I should have known better. I have a little personal history with McDonald’s, you see. Once a few years ago after a big family day out we stopped at a McDonald’s in response to cries from a back-seatful of grandchildren pleading for an unhealthy meal, and I was put in charge of placing the order. I carefully interviewed everyone in the party – about ten of us, from two cars – collated the order on to the back of an old envelope and approached the counter.
‘OK,’ I said decisively to the youthful attendant when my turn came, ‘I would like five Big Macs, four quarter-pound cheese- burgers, two chocolate milkshakes—’
At this point someone stepped up to tell me that one of the children wanted chicken nuggets instead of a Big Mac.
‘Sorry,’ I said and then resumed. ‘Make that four Big Macs, four quarter-pound cheeseburgers, two chocolate milkshakes—’
At this point, some small person tugging on my sleeve informed me that he wanted a strawberry milkshake, not a chocolate one. ‘Right,’ I said, returning to the young attendant, ‘make that four Big Macs, four quarter-pound cheeseburgers, one chocolate milkshake, one strawberry milkshake, three chicken nuggets . . .’
And so it went on as I worked my way through and from time to time adjusted the group’s long and complicated order.
When the food came, the young man produced about eleven trays with thirty or forty bags of food on them.
‘What’s this?’ I said.
‘Your order,’ he replied and read my order back to me off the till: ‘Thirty-four Big Macs, twenty quarter-pound cheeseburgers, twelve chocolate shakes . . .’ It turned out that instead of adjusting my order each time I restarted, he had just added to it.
‘I didn’t ask for twenty quarter-pound cheeseburgers, I asked for four quarter-pound cheeseburgers five times.’
‘Same thing,’ he said.
‘It’s not the same thing at all. You can’t be this stupid.’
Two of the people waiting behind me in the queue sided with the young attendant.
‘You did ask for all that stuff,’ one of them said.
The duty manager came over and looked at the till. ‘It says twenty quarter-pound cheeseburgers here,’ he said as if it were a gun with my fingerprints on it.
‘I know what it says there, but that isn’t what I asked for.’
One of my grown children came over to find out what was going on. I explained to him what had happened and he weighed the matter judiciously and decided that, taken all in all, it was my fault.
‘I can’t believe you are all this stupid,’ I said to an audience that consisted now of about sixteen people, some of them newly arrived but already taking against me. Eventually my wife came over and led me away by the elbow, the way I used to watch her lead jabbering psychiatric patients off to a quiet room. She sorted the mess out amicably with the manager and attendant, brought two trays of food to the table in about thirty seconds, and informed me that I was never again to venture into a McDonald’s whether alone or under supervision.
And now here I was in McDonald’s again for the first time since my earlier fracas. I vowed to behave myself, but McDonald’s is just too much for me. I ordered a chicken sandwich and a Diet Coke.
‘Do you want fries with that?’ the young man serving me asked. I hesitated for a moment, and in a pained but patient tone said:
‘No. That’s why I didn’t ask for fries, you see.’
‘We’re just told to ask like,’ he said.
‘When I want fries, generally I say something like, “I would like some fries, too, please.” That’s the system I use.’
‘We’re just told to ask like,’ he repeated.
‘Do you need to know the other things I don’t want? It is quite a long list. In fact, it is everything you serve except for the two things I asked for.’
‘We’re just told to ask like,’ he repeated yet again, but in a darker voice, and deposited my two items on a tray and urged me, without the least hint of sincerity, to have a nice day. I realized that I probably wasn’t quite ready for McDonald’s yet.
Product details
- ASIN : B00X2F7N3M
- Publisher : Anchor (January 19, 2016)
- Publication date : January 19, 2016
- Language : English
- File size : 8840 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 382 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #246,705 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #8 in Australia Travel
- #23 in Welsh History
- #27 in England Travel
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1951. Settled in England for many years, he moved to America with his wife and four children for a few years ,but has since returned to live in the UK. His bestselling travel books include The Lost Continent, Notes From a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods and Down Under. His acclaimed work of popular science, A Short History of Nearly Everything, won the Aventis Prize and the Descartes Prize, and was the biggest selling non-fiction book of the decade in the UK.
Photography © Julian J
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Into my comparison comes the new "The Road to Little Dribbling." Or, perhaps, I should not say new. Although I had it set for pre-order on my Kindle for some time and read it pretty much immediately after it downloaded, it has, apparently, been out for some months in other formats, because Bryson has antiquated publishers. I was one of the people who clicked on (perhaps multiple times) the tell the publisher you want to read this on Kindle link for "Notes." So wake up, publishers -- perhaps you would have had more serious fans reviewing the book sooner if you had released it at the same time for ebooks as you did for dead tree books.
Anyway. As I read this, I became aware in a way that I had not while reading "Notes," that it is possible that the Thereoux of his time and the Bryson of "Little Dribbling" were equally crotchety old men, both finding reasons to be irritated by incompetent and/or stupid people they met along their travels. But even if they were, Thereoux is either one of the most humorless writers of all time, or imbued with such a dry sarcasm that I -- who feel myself to have a pretty high sarcasm meter -- picked up on absolutely none of it. Also, while Bryson seems to have met with an equal mix of incompetent/stupid people, he also met with a reasonable range of coherent/interesting/clever ones, in the course of "Little Dribbling."
Also, any increased crochetiness was basically forgiven because this is, hands-down, the book I have laughed out loud reading more than any other, as I tore through it in the course of two days. I travel to Britain every year, so perhaps the jokes and the subtle humor are closer to home for me, but they were absolutely spot-on, and absolutely hilarious.
I love reading when Bryson writes about Britain because I think he feels the same way I do about the place -- that it is filled with idiosyncratic but lovely people, and that it has so much amazingly beautiful landscape that needs to be preserved. It is a place you love wholeheartedly, while simultaneously understanding that it is, in many ways, ridiculous.
I gather some people were unhappy about the amount of time spent on Scotland and Wales. Don't get me wrong, Bryson could probably do a whole book on Scotland or Wales and I would find it endlessly amusing, BUT, what he generally did was stick to a fair amount of well-known tourist routes and locales, which does differ from "Notes." Frankly, because I had just been to a lot of these places, I found it more interesting. I didn't 100% agree with him all of the time, but I appreciated his perspective.
And the fundamental theme of his book, and what I have felt is the fundamental theme of Britain, is that there is just too damn much to see in any one visit, or any one route. So much has happened there, and there are so many preserved sites, and so many museums, that I go there every year for 2.5 weeks, and still have not seen a fraction of what I want to see. So from personal experience, I can understand if he started in the south and encountered most of a book's worth of material before hitting Yorkshire.
I will say that the title, while amusing and wholly British, had no context within the actual book, so far as I remember. I got to the acknowledgements and there was some note about it, and I was like, "wait, that was never actually mentioned in the text." However, this was so amusing, and I was so eager to see Bryson's writing about Britain again, that I probably would have pre-ordered it even if the title was "Bugger Bognor Regis."
As the author himself admits when describing the genesis of the book in his editor's office, there is a danger it could become a re-hash of his earlier book on Britain, "Notes from a Small Island." Having noted this obvious pitfall, he proceeds to tumble squarely into it. "Little Dribbling" will seem awfully familiar to those who have read the earlier work.
As with "Notes," most of the text consists of Bryson describing the landscapes and townscapes he encounters on solitary walks, mixed in with snippets of local history, culture, and current events, and with informal social commentary. It is an approach that has worked for him in the past, and he is a master of it: his descriptions are gorgeous, his background material is well-researched, and his commentary is humorous and thought-provoking. The problem here (as with "Notes") is that there is sometimes quite a bit of similarity in the local scenery, people, and history from one place to the next, so at times it starts to run together. Some of the most memorable passages involve Bryson's encounters with locals and fellow travelers, and I would have liked more this.
One aspect in which this book works less well for me than "Notes" and other Bryson books is the narrative voice. I've always found Bryson's curmudgeonly-but-cheerful persona hugely entertaining. It often brings a smile and even a chuckle as I read. It's still here in this book, but at points it seems to shade into something a little nastier, something almost misanthropic. Maybe it's just me, but there seems to be more gratuitous swearing and summary dismissal of interlocutors as stupid (or worse) than I remember in past works.
In the end, though, anything by Bill Bryson has enough great moments to make it worth the price of admission. On the whole, I would recommend this book, but I hope he tries something a little more original, and maybe less snippy, the next time out.
Top reviews from other countries
As soon as I began reading I was drawn in by his clever use of the English language but I liked that this clever use of language is never exclusive or over complicated, just incredibly witty, insightful and always inviting the reader to crack on to the next page, next chapter, the next entertaining observation of human behaviour.
However, perhaps the very best thing about Bill Bryson is that despite his many books centred around Britain and the British way of life, he is not British, he's American. This gives his work its greatest strength because it enables us, the reader to see ourselves and our country through the eyes of a traveller from another land and it's a wonderful perspective to have.