Is there any subject whatsoever that couldn’t be made a thousand times more interesting by getting Bill Bryson to write a book about it? Truly this man has an awesome talent for taking a mundane – even dull – topic, and crafting it into something fascinating. You find yourself
trapped within the pages of a Bryson book, as engrossed as if it was a Donna Tartt novel. And you feel as bereft at the end. I hardly ever read travel books, and yet I devoured ‘Notes from a Small Island,’ (travels in Britain), ‘Neither Here nor There,’ (Europe), ‘Down Under,’ (Down Under), ‘The Lost Continent,’ (USA), and ‘The Road to Little Dribbling,’ (Britain again) and I’ve even read some of them twice. And ‘A Walk in the Woods,’ the chronicle of Bryson’s failed attempt to conquer the Appalachian Trail is a modern classic. Give the man a subject and he’ll come back at you with a best-selling book; and, damn him, I will probably buy the book while it is still in hardback because I simply won’t be able to wait for the softback. Thus – the human body (‘The Body’), Domesticity (‘At Home’), America in 1927 (‘One Summer’) Shakespeare (‘Shakespeare’) and American English (‘Made in America.’) Oh – and the whole history of science (‘A Short History of Nearly Everything.’) I want to tell you that every one of these is an absolute five-star gem, and I admire the heck out of them.
How does he do
it? What is Bryson’s secret recipe? I wish I knew. He comes upon every subject
from an oblique angle, and introduces us to odd characters, and follows up with
quirky anecdotes, and writes in a folksy style. But he never patronises us. Or belittles
his subject. He writes with a delicate balance of respect and irreverence – never
quite crossing the line either way. The man is a master of his craft. I have a
shelf of his books to prove my devotion.
But I need to pick one; one Bryson book for this blog. And, as it happens, this is an easy task. I pick ‘Mother Tongue.’ It’s quite simply the best exploration of the English language you will ever read. Every page is packed with gems. It’s a travel book of a kind, touring the world’s use of it’s widest spoken language, from ancient Britons to modern creoles via cockney rhymes, swearing, and word origins. It is utterly delicious.
Here's a flavour:
"In the country inns of a small corner of northern Germany, in the spur of land connecting Schleswig-Holstein to Denmark, you can sometimes hear people talking in what sounds eerily like a lost dialect of English. Occasional snatches of it even make sense, as when they say that the “veather ist cold” or inquire of the time by asking, “What ist de clock?” According to Professor Hubertus Menke, head of the German Department at Kiel University, the language is “very close to the way people spoke in Britain more than 1,000 years ago."
Or this:
Some cultures don't swear at all. The Finns, lacking the sort of words you need to describe your feelings when you stub your toe getting up to answer a wrongh number at 2:00 am rather oddly adopted the word 'ravintolassa.' It means 'in the restaurant.'
The dog eared copy in the photo is my own dog-eared copy. I couldn't find an image to steal off Amazon and it worries me that this book might be going out of print. Scour the bookshops. Get yourself a copy. You'll thank me.
Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com
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