Bill Bryson's "The Road to Little Dribbling": An American's Expedition Through Britain

Deb: This book is such a fun and informative read! I enjoyed it very much.

United Kingdom on Nov 29, 2023

K. M. Jacobs: I discovered Bill Bryson by accident whilst browsing in my local bookshop one rainy afternoon, is there any better thing to do on a rainy afternoon?
As soon as I began reading I was drawn in by his clever use of the English language but I liked that this clever use of language is never exclusive or over complicated, just incredibly witty, insightful and always inviting the reader to crack on to the next page, next chapter, the next entertaining observation of human behaviour.
However, perhaps the very best thing about Bill Bryson is that despite his many books centred around Britain and the British way of life, he is not British, he's American. This gives his work its greatest strength because it enables us, the reader to see ourselves and our country through the eyes of a traveller from another land and it's a wonderful perspective to have.

United Kingdom on Nov 02, 2023

Placeholder: I like his style. He sees things a little different than most people. I enjoy his different look at thing, people and places.

United States on Sep 09, 2023

Jacki21uk: I was looking forward to reading this, as I am a big fan of Bill Bryson. There are some laugh out loud sections, particularly in the first few chapters. However, it is disappointing that this is not a trip from Bognor to Cape Wrath at all. I realised I was half way through the book and Bill was still in the South of England. Most of the time, he describes visits to places he has been before, and most of the time there is a sense that he was going there or had already been anyway, he didn’t go as part of the book. Many of the locations are places he is familiar with because he’s lived near there, or visited a lot. He includes long factual sections about people who lived in the location, or specific buildings, landmarks, but often these feel like something he has googled to fill a space, not his experience of the visit. The Bryson line is a joke, which I think backfires. He obviously couldn’t follow the line exactly, but he spends much of his time on the edges of the country, nowhere near his “line”. The best sections are when he is genuinely on a journey with some unexpected scenery, experiences or conversations. Sadly, there are not many of these.

When Bill...

United Kingdom on Aug 21, 2022

Fastidious Kingdoms: 2.5 stars
I bought this book three years ago and finally got around to reading it. I wish I hadn’t. Yes, the book is full of trivia, like the story of the first man killed by a train and the aggressive cows and the site of the factory that sparked the Industrial Revolution.

There’s also a charming aside about Britain’s road numbers. “What makes the system enchanting to people like Emmerson and Bancroft is that it doesn’t actually work. It never could. That is, as I say, the brilliance of it. For one thing, roads must leave their assigned sectors in order to proceed across the country. The A38, for instance, starts in Zone 3, as it ought to, but trespasses into Zones 4, 5, and 6 as it travels from Devon to Nottinghamshire. The A41 actually starts and finishes in Zone 5. It’s called the A41 because—well, I don’t know why. The rule—I am not making this up; no one could—is that roads may venture into other zones and retain their number as long as their direction of travel is clockwise and not anticlockwise, though this rule has exceptions, too.”

This book’s organization is as muddled as the road system. I had been led to believe at the outset...

United States on Dec 16, 2019

cag2012: I had always compared Bill Bryson's "Notes from a Small Island," which utterly delighted me and was one of the most hilarious and captivating books I've ever read, to Paul Thereoux's "The Kingdom by the Sea," which makes Britain out to be the most unfortunate and horrible place on the entire planet.

Into my comparison comes the new "The Road to Little Dribbling." Or, perhaps, I should not say new. Although I had it set for pre-order on my Kindle for some time and read it pretty much immediately after it downloaded, it has, apparently, been out for some months in other formats, because Bryson has antiquated publishers. I was one of the people who clicked on (perhaps multiple times) the tell the publisher you want to read this on Kindle link for "Notes." So wake up, publishers -- perhaps you would have had more serious fans reviewing the book sooner if you had released it at the same time for ebooks as you did for dead tree books.

Anyway. As I read this, I became aware in a way that I had not while reading "Notes," that it is possible that the Thereoux of his time and the Bryson of "Little Dribbling" were equally crotchety old men, both finding reasons to be irritated...

United States on Jan 22, 2016

Sophie Newton: “More Notes” follows cold on the heels (20 years later) of its predecessor “Notes”. Like “Notes” and Bill Bryson’s other travel books, this book combines travelogue, digressions, and opinion pieces (rants, really). Sadly, it misses the mark. Although parts of it are enjoyable and educational, the travelogue is superficial and some of the rants are irritating.

The itinerary stems from Bryson’s reading of the study guide for the British citizenship test. Apparently, it says that Land’s End and John o’Groats are maximally remote. But you would have to zigzag across the country to travel from one to the other. Bryson found that the longest straight line in the UK is from Bognor Regis to Cape Wrath, so he determined to begin and end at these places. He says in the prologue that he decided not to stick to the line. In fact, he hops around the country seemingly randomly, though he does start at Bognor Regis and end at Cape Wrath.

One way of appraising travel writing is to see whether it captures the essence of places you know. On one level, I agree with many of Bryson’s judgements. However, he spent so little time in each place that the judgements are...

United Kingdom on Oct 11, 2015

Troy Parfitt: Travel literature is the genre that made Bill Bryson famous. From his debut, The Lost Continent (1989), to Down Under (2000), the cerebral yet comedic author from Des Moines, Iowa helped resuscitate the travel narrative and take it mainstream. However, after the millennial publication of his romp around Australia, Bryson diversified, penning books about science (A Short History of Nearly Everything), his youth (The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid), the Bard of Avon (Shakespeare), and everything from the spice trade (At Home) to baseball (One Summer).

My first Bryson read was A Walk in the Woods, giddily passed around my workplace, and hurriedly followed by the prequel to The Road to Little Dribbling: Notes from a Small Island – the book that made Bill a celebrity in Britain and supposedly outsold more than any other travelogue. Subsequently, I was hooked and devoured most of Bryson’s other efforts. Some of those efforts (e.g. Shakespeare) are outstanding, but it was the travel narratives that left the deepest impression.

Bill Bryson introduced me to travel literature, meaning that prior to A Walk in the Woods, I didn’t know the category existed. In an...

United Kingdom on Oct 09, 2015