Bill Bryson might be the funniest man alive. For real. I finished reading I'm a Stranger Here Myself on Friday, and I laughed so hard I kept having to run to the bathroom. There were some reviews on the back cover for Bryson's book, A Walk in the Woods, which I read earlier in the fall. One of them said something along the lines of "Bill Bryson could make mundane things like pain relievers and fabric softener laugh out loud funny." And he can. I mean, seriously, look at the front cover of this book:
It's a magnifier that looks like a face. How clever is that? Basically, the whole book is a series of short articles that he had written after returning to the United States to live after spending the last twenty years in Great Britain. He covers a variety of topics--Americans love/hate relationships with small town main streets (we love the IDEA of them...just not actually walking around and shopping AT them), celebrations like Christmas and Thanksgiving, red tape surrounding his British wife's residency papers, and so much more. The whole book was so hysterically funny, I couldn't stop. I loved it. Seriously.
It's the third Bryson book I've read (his memoir, "Adventures of the Thunderbolt Kid" and "A Walk in the Woods" being the other two), and I have to say that with each book, I love his style more and more. It's a thinking person's funny. Wry, somewhat sarcastic, and always punctuated with some sort of social commentary or reference. I heartily recommend this book!
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