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

Being a longtime fan of Bill Bryson, and a Britophile, it was only a matter of time before I picked up this book. I’ve always found Bryson to be rather an unlikely traveler, and this, I suppose, is part of the inherent humor in his books. His approach is a bit haphazard, and he sort of ping-pongs to all corners of Britain—the well-known spots as well as the “undiscovered” bits, and even the less attractive parts.

At the start of the book he proposes a diagonal axis, the “Bryson Line” from Bognor Regis to Cape Wrath in Scotland, which he intends to follow, but doesn’t really. Rather, he seem to end up going just where he pleases—Sailsbury Plain, Cornwall, Wales, London, Norfolk, Yorkshire… True, as others have noticed, in this volume he seems frequently grumpy and at times overly nostalgic for the times when every hamlet was defined by an independent ironmonger, a post office, a tea room, and a butcher. But just as frequently he rhapsodizes about what makes Britain unique, and what anyone who has ever traveled there will identify as its allure—the history, the landscape, the railroads, the tea shops… There are still so many magical places in Britain, and when he writes about the green countryside and the charming villages he is at his best. Sure, there are things that Britain has lost, but so much survives.

UK cover

I loved looking up spots where he wandered like the Pembrokeshire Coast, Tenby, the Settle-Carlisle railway, and an earthworks sculpture called Northumberlandia. He always reveals a corner of Britain that is worth exploring, if only via the pages of a book.

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Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

So Much for That / Lionel Shriver

This novel comes from the 2005 Orange Prize winning author of We Need to Talk About Kevin , a disturbing book in which a parent with ambivalent feelings towards motherhood deals with the aftermath of a Columbine-style school killing perpetrated by her son. Lionel Shriver has said that she prefers to create characters that are hard to love, and So Much for That certainly contains some flinty characters, who although they may be hard to love, are nevertheless very believable. The topic this time is healthcare in America. Shep is all ready to launch into an exotic early retirement on the island of Pemba off the eastern coast of Africa, but when his wife reveals a diagnosis of mesothelioma, he must hold on to his job to maintain family health coverage to see her through her devastating illness. His work colleague and friend, Jackson, experiences a medical dilemma completely of his own doing, which proves to be his un doing. Jackson's daughter suffers from an unusual genetic disorde...

Murder in Passy, An Aimée Leduc Investigation / Cara Black

If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...

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