Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson

I wrote recently about how there’s nowhere to go right now, but over the course of this week I have realized that that’s not strictly true. I have spent my week in England, thanks to one of my favorite genres--travel memoir.

I fell in love with this genre when I read a book called Junior Year Abroad. I think I was in middle school when I checked it out from the library, and it was probably already old then; I can’t find it on Amazon now. It solidified my love of Europe and my dream to spend a semester abroad myself, which, because of money, I never did. 

But that book was probably why I picked up Frances Mayes’s Under the Tuscan Sun many years later. I thought it was beautifully written, and I loved the glimpses both into owning a home in another country and into everyday life in that country itself. I don’t know how many times I read it and several of her other books about travel. They were slow, quiet, and transforming.

After Tuscany, I discovered Bill Bryson, and my life has not been the same since.

This week, I’ve been re-reading my first Bill Bryson book--Notes from a Small Island. I wish I could remember why I picked this up, but I don’t know. I only know that it is hilarious, and that it lets me experience small-town England in a time when I’m mostly just stuck in my house.

The premise of the book is that before Bryson and his family move back to the States, after 20 years together in England, his wife’s native country, he travels alone around the island, beginning in Dover, where he first encountered Great Britain so many years ago.

In a lesser writer’s hands this might not have worked at all. England’s small towns are not where travel writers always focus, and this might have been a quick ramble through them with notes on a good cup of tea here and there. But under Bryson’s pen, memories emerge, and the present is compared with the past and found, in most instances, to be sorely and hilariously lacking. 

I’ve read this book repeatedly and cried with laughter every time. I read the same funny parts out loud to Joe and laugh all over again. Bryson has a knack for attacking the hubris in society, and in himself, and at the same time showing the outstanding beauty and meaning of a place in a way that makes you want to visit it too. As I read Bryson, the world, so big and awesome, gets smaller and even more full of wonder. 

I can’t go to England now, except in this way I’ve gone since childhood, when I read and re-read the library’s biography of William Shakespeare. Travel writers, please keep going. I want to keep seeing what I cannot see alone.