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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And the Mountains Echoed / Khaled Hosseini

The latest book by the author of The Kite Runner reads like a collection of short stories, but they are all interconnected. The link between stories isn’t always immediately apparent and there are some diversions that take the reader far from Kabul, and sometimes confusingly so (the detour to Greece was interesting, but a bit disconnected from the rest of the storyline, I thought). There were some great narratives—one in particular that I think was worth the whole of the book— a story about Afghani-American cousins, Idris and Timur, who return to Kabul to attempt to regain an ancestral home, abandoned after the Soviet invasion. While Timur goes out and carouses and flaunts his American wealth, Idris spends most of his time showing charity to a young girl in hospital, a victim of an unspeakable act of violence which leaves her in need of surgery in a western nation. Idris, himself a doctor, promises to arrange the needed medical intervention, but when he returns to the US, the...

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.

Wide Sargasso Sea / Jean Rhys

The mysterious figure of Bertha Mason provides much of the tension in Jane Eyre , but what does the reader really know about her? Rochester provides some details of her past, but is his account reliable? Caribbean author Jean Rhys attempted to tell the story of Rochester's insane (and perhaps misunderstood) wife in her 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea . It's a sort of prequel to Jane Eyre . I'm afraid Rochester doesn't come out looking good, though we always knew he had a bit of a wild side with his continental dalliances. Anyway, there's a lot of interesting backstory about Bertha's origins in Jamaica, her real name, the tragic circumstances of her upbringing, and how she was established at Thornfield Hall. Gosh, if Jane had only known all these details about Rochester, she might have taken St. John up on his offer of marriage. All in all, Wide Sargasso Sea is pretty credible, but I missed Charlotte Bronte's flowery language, and of course th...

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