The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain

An Amazon Best Book of January 2016:The Road to Little Dribbling comes twenty years after Bill Bryson s Notes from a Small Island, in which he first described his love affair with his adopted Great Britain. That first book was laugh-out-loud funny, and so is this one. It opens with Bryson describing (hilariously) the perils of growing older, eventually revealing the author s successful passing of the Life in Britain Knowledge Test (thus, making him a British citizen). The rest of the book follows that pattern: Bryson describes getting older, and he describes Great Britain via a trip he took across the 700 mile long island. While he tried to avoid places he visited in Notes from a Small Island he does revisit Dover those who read the first book will enjoy a welcome sense of the familiar even if Bryson appears to have grown a little more cynical and angry with age. But give the guy a break: the world is changing, even his beloved cozy and embraceable island. And as he writes in the book, I recently realized with dismay that I am even too old for early onset dementia. Any dementia I get will be right on time. --Chris Schluep