Bill Bryson's Genius
“I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.”
This is how Bill Bryson starts his novel, The Lost Continent, where he writes about a road trip through all of the unheard of small towns across America, documenting every odd stop, strange observation, and quirky side road that constitutes the American landscape.
A book about some ole’ dude driving a 14,000 mile circuit to the most unheard of places in the US (like Beulah, Wyoming, pop: 73) for 300 some odd pages might not sound very interesting. Bill Bryson, however, isn’t just some ole’ dude. He thrives on turning the uneventful and uninteresting into hilariously insightful stories that make you feel like you’re having dinner at his house while he rants about life and the world.
Widely regarded as one of the best humor travel writers of all time, Bryson has spent his life filling books with stories that turn even the most mundane events and places into addictive, funny, yet enlightening writing. Read any of his books and you’ll find yourself laughing at his wit, sympathizing with his travel disasters, and learning something real about the world thanks to his incredibly deep research on the places he visits.
Australia, Great Britain, the Appalachian Trail, and all the fun oddities in between, his stories are much more than your typical travel analogue. On every page, he ties his tragic-comedy style experiences into the greater context of a nation’s culture and heritage so you walk away feeling like you understand the foreign land a little bit better.
How does he do it?
He Educates You on the Forest, Then Tells a Story About the Trees
Read any Bill Bryson book and you’ll quickly realize that he likely spends as much time reading and learning about a place as he does actually traveling through it. And it’s not just the typical travel research. In A Walk in the Woods, he sometimes spends entire chapters talking not only about the history of the Appalachian Trail, but he goes on and on about the National Park Service, the politics behind their funding struggles, and their successes and failures at conservation.
And you know what? It never once feels boring or mundane. Every word of research, no matter how obscure, feels both humorous and relevant to his story.
Bryson achieves this by starting out with the big picture, then narrowing it down to the personal. He starts by writing objective facts about the “forest” before telling his personal narrative about the “trees.” A Walk in the Woodsprobably has the best examples of this, where he often begins a chapter talking about the history of something—say, scientific studies on the frequency of bear attacks, bear migration patterns, and an endless list of bear facts—and then in the next paragraph he makes it personal by retelling his nightmare visions of being mauled to death all because he left an open snickers bar in the tent.
Speaking of bears…
He Turns the Stressful into the Hilarious, and the Exotic into the Familiar
If there’s any one thing that makes Bill Bryson’s books impossible to put down, it’s his ability to turn any stressful event or tragic travel experience into absolute hilarity thanks to his dry wit. He frets for nearly the entirety of A Walk in the Woods about bears. He’s nearly positive that he will, at some point, get eaten by one to the extent that he starts wildly describing what such an attack would look like. He shows the readers these absurdist visions of his demise that leave his audience laughing at his worst-case scenario fears—disregard the fact that he never actually sees a single bear on the entire trip.
He also makes you connect emotionally with his experiences by describing foreign and strange places in such a way that you can totally relate to it. He turns the exotic into the familiar by viewing everything through the observational lens of a normal guy from Des Moines. Never in his books do you feel like he’s being condescending to his readers or flaunting his travel expertise. He rarely gives off the air of a famous, well-experienced traveller and writer—even if he is exactly that.
When you read a Bill Bryson book, you feel like you’re in the car next to him while he recounts his stories—like you’re best friends. His writing is personal, relatable, and humble. Aspiring writers looking to learn from a master or anyone looking for a fun escape to broaden his/her mind should pick up a Bill Bryson book today.
