He doesn’t seem to me like the type of guy who retires. His travel books, sure - I can see him not hiking the Appalachian Trail. I don’t hike it on a daily basis. But his works on the English language, or as a reference for editors, are sufficiently pedantic that I can’t see him going gentle into that good night.
I agree he’s not a travel writer, as such. He ambles from place to place, and is a witty observer. He compares himself unfavourably to Theroux, although he is more fun to read.
Bill Bryson’s At Home: A Short History of Private Life, was the best book I read in…I think it was 2015 or 2016.
That book is usually keyed up on my phones Kindle app for times when I need to wait on something/one. You can drop in anywhere and be fascinated.
Katz is out of the bag. *Angerer is better known by the pseudonym Stephen Katz, Bill Bryson’s hiking buddy in the 1998 best-selling book A Walk in the Woods
I am bummed but not surprised. But so hard to find young authors who can write well, hold my attention, and tell a good story.
I don’t understand why one would think this. I mean, if he was going to make it up, why would he not make up a version where they got a hell of a lot further?
The fact they fail to do the trail - or really even a substantial fraction of it - makes the book’s central story much more broken up, and makes the narrative less compelling. He has to spend the last half of it talking about little day long field trips he does to the rest of the trail without Katz. The book would be a way, way better read if he made it up.
Oh, and Stephen Katz is a real person. His name is Matthew Angerer, and he has confirmed these things took place.
I am sure he dressed up some details for humor, but if it’s entirely fictional he must also have gotten his family to all be liars, which seems a bit unlikely.
The ones on the English language are also full of errors.
Just wanted to say thanks for the tip. It’s one of many Bryson books that I had not read. I still maintain that Erik Larson is a more captivating (and probably more accurate) non-fiction storyteller. His books literally read like novels. But I’m definitely enjoying At Home.
Here’s a little extract from the chapter I just finished that’s a good illustration of both Bryson’s humour and the fact that you can never be quite sure whether you can really believe in the veracity of what he writes, but hey, it’s still fun: 
It is fair to say that there has almost certainly never been another architect like Addison Mizner. He didn’t believe in blueprints and was notoriously approximate in his instructions to his workmen … He was famously forgetful, too. Sometimes he installed doors that opened onto blank walls or, in one interesting case, revealed the interior of a chimney … For a client named George S. Rasmussen, Mizner forgot to include a staircase and so put an external one up on an outside wall as an afterthought. This compelled Mr. and Mrs. Rasmussen to put on rainwear or other appropriate attire when they wished to go from floor to floor in their own home. When asked about this oversight, Mizner reportedly said it didn’t matter because he didn’t like Mr. Rasmussen anyway.
Pretty much any book that is picked over will be held by some to be full of errors- and sometimes they will even be right, instead of it just being their opinion.
English Grammar is 90% opinion, 10% rules.
You are the only one to think it was “faked”. In fact some people have said they met him on the trail. Yes, it was fictionalized and gussied up to be funnier, but it is based upon his very real attempt- and failure.
I most love his earlier books on travel. Nearly every chapter ends with him getting snockered in the local pub and happily staggering back to his room for the night.
Some of the essays in his book I’m a Stranger Here Myself/Notes From a Big Country had me laughing aloud.
He has the ability to make his writing look deceptively simple.
To be fair to his critics, I believe that the main criticisms are not concerned with any comments about grammar, but rather with some of his allegations about the etymology of the language. Even in this current book that I’m still reading that I mentioned above, there are various allegations of fact about word origins and various other things that I find a bit suspect.
Nevertheless, Bryson is a good writer and sounds like a fun guy with a lively sense of humour, and I’m not trying to put him down or discourage his fans. But I’m also very mindful of factual and historical accuracy and laziness in that sphere bothers me a lot.
Exactly. Nothing about grammar, all about the history of the language including etymology. We even had a thread on these boards years ago about the errors in The Mother Tongue.
I checked that- most sources for all those errors is a Amazon review.
Those books are pretty old. Maybe that was just the consensus view at the time.
Nope. The things he got wrong were known to wrong at the time he published. Some of them may have been thought true at some previous time, but not in 1990.
I remember one in specific, because we discussed it at length in the previous thread. It was that there were only two words borrowed from modern German into English. That is, as opposed to Germanic words that have been in English all along. In that thread, we came up with about 100 such words. And those had been known to be borrowings from the time they were borrowed.
I lean towards the view that, if he hadn’t had to work for a living, he should have retired far earlier. The first books – just after he retired from journalism – are great. Then it tailed out.
They are all great, IMHO.
Thunderbolt Kid and One Summer: America, 1927 are fantastic.
“I lean towards the view that, if he hadn’t had to work for a living, he should have retired far earlier. The first books – just after he retired from journalism – are great. Then it tailed out.” - Melbourne
This. I enjoy his observations and ability to laugh at himself, but the most recent books seemed a bit more forced as he looked around a little more desperately for something to laugh about or create a story about.