Read with me: Bill Bryson

My first acquaintance with Bill Bryson's books began with Neither Here Nor There and I must say I was hooked. Neither Here nor There is about the author's travels in Europe from Hammerfest in Norway, where he went to see the northern lights, to Istanbul in 1990s. The combination of his passion for travelling, his humour and his unique style makes this book a delight to read. And it certainly makes you want to visit some of the places he describes so deliciously while you also want to stay away from some others. Bill Bryson's descriptions of his experiences are outrageously funny and you've got to love his at times crude and straightforward humour. A perfect read for any fan of travel writing (and travelling).

My next Bill Bryson read was his second book about Great Britain - The Road to Little Dribling (I still have to read the first one "Notes from a Small Island") where he revisits the places he'd travelled through before and compares how they've changed in 20 years.

It's an entertaining and educational read, not as laugh out loud funny as his book Neither Here Nor There, with a bit more bitching and a few surprises: did you know that most brands that we associate with Great Britain are no longer British, they had been bought by various foreign and multinational companies?! "These days, Britain makes Rolls-Royce jet engines and all the little pots of marmalade in the world, but that's about it, as far as I can tell. Nearly everything else seems to be owned by foreigners. United Biscuits, which make McVitie's Digestives, Jaffa Cakes and Hula Hoops, is owned by Yildiz, a Turkish company. Jaguar,...British Steel, Harrods...most of the main airports, several of the important football teams...are all foreign owned."

And it wouldn't be Bill Bryson if the book wasn't peppered with interesting facts from history and science.

And last but not least - A Short History of Nearly Everything. It is the ultimate popular science book, covering topics from astronomy, to geology, physics, chemistry, biology, the origin of species and the theory of relativity - that is pretty much everything!

It's an impressive result of tremendous research done by the author and put into plain English with entertaining (and not so entertaining) stories about famous scientists, insights into how discoveries were made and how the science evolved.

It was very funny and sad at the same time to read about scientists like Cavendish, who were so painfully shy that they kept all their discoveries to themselves and never got credit for them.

It seems incredible how much unfairness there is in the world of science (well, no different than in the rest of the world) - when some scientists steal their colleagues' ideas, some scientists are lucky to be recognised and others aren't...

It's unbelievable how much harmful stuff was discovered, invented, and used until it caused deaths of thousands of people and even then big corporations making money from it refused to acknowledge it!

And how about this scientific explanation of reincarnation (presuming you all agree that we are all composed of atoms): " Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms...probably once belonged to Shakespeare... So we are all reincarnations - though short-lived ones. When we die, our atoms will disassemble and move off to find new uses elsewhere - as part of a leaf or other human being or drop of dew." Isn't it fascinating?

And here is a statement in the spirit of "The Matrix": " It is still a fairly astounding notion to consider that atoms are mostly empty space, and that the solidity we experience all around us is an illusion."

How cool is that?

This book is not the easiest of reads (at least for me), so I had to skim through some chapters, but it's certainly a great book if you are a fan of science, quantum physics and the Matrix!