bill bryson at home a short history of private life

I found this book both engrossing and overwhelming - there were so many facts that mind was sometimes reeling, yet I didn't want to put the book down. Bryson manages to weave in the history of houses and the discovery of ancient British settlements that predate Stonehenge Thomas Edison (and the fact that he technically didn't invent the lightbulb) Darwin's theories of evolution Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and Washington's Mount Vernon and a lot more information about bedbugs and mites that I personally couldn't bear to read (sorry, I was too grossed out and skipped parts of that chapter). If you read this book, you'll learn an awful lot about the daily workings of Victorian life - servants, food, childcare - but you'll learn a lot of other little interesting factoids as well. So, yes, this is a book about the history of the everyday, but it's so much more than that. He makes lateral moves that somehow, eventually, circle back to the original topic. Why do we put salt and pepper on the table? What kind of toilets did people have 200 years ago? Why do we say 'make the bed'? And so on, et cetera. On the surface, this is a book about the history of houses and domestic life - the things that everyone encounters in their daily life, the mundane, the ordinary. However, if you've read Bill Bryson, you understand how his books are not always what they seem. Theoretically, each chapter is focused on that topic. He used the template of his house as the template of the book - it's divided into chapters named after every room in his house: 'The Hallway,' 'The Kitchen,' 'The Scullery,' and so on. This got him thinking about everyday life. Several years ago, Bryson and his family returned to England and purchased a home built in 1851, a former rectory.

It even delayed my participation in Virago Reading week! But it was really worth it.Īt Home: A Short History of Private Life is a bit hard to describe. I am allowing, it, however, because I put it on hold at the library months before the end of the year, and there was a long waiting list - in effect, this was grandfathered in. Well, this is a digression from the TBR Dare - a library book! (gasp!).

Bill bryson at home a short history of private life