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I'm a Stranger Here Myself

Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away
Community comment are the opinions of contributing users. These comment do not represent the opinions of Strathcona County Library.
Jun 09, 2018Indoorcamping rated this title 2.5 out of 5 stars
Stupidly chose this book for an assignment and boy am I regretting it. Bill Bryson is lovely - Notes from a Small Island convinced me to move to England a few decades ago with my English husband - but this one is simply a collection of dorky grandpa-who-doesn't-understand-these-newfangled-gadgets columns. You can't expect a collection of newspaper columns to have the same gravitas as a travel memoir, and you would still be disappointed. I don't get the whole point of this except to show that he's a first class curmudgeon who is out of step, and since the book was published before Y2K, everything is already out of step and ancient. Even his writing is repetitive. His wife is the straight man to his idiot goofy old man naïveté/complaining/whining. Seriously, it's so repetitive that he writes a column about her commenting that all he does is complain. The other option for my required reading was "Eat, Pray, Love" and like everyone else, I'd already read it and I hate re-reading as it doesn't seem a good use of my reading time. I was wrong, wrong, wrong. Should have picked up almost any other Bill Bryson book and faked it.