35. 
Title: At Home
Author: Bill Bryson
Pages: 592 pages
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Medium: Ebook
Acquisition: Library book
Date Completed: April 21, 2012
Rating: ***

At Home is not the book I had hoped it would be; focused primarily on the home developed by the Victorians, the book is a brief history of inventions and biographies loosely related to the domestic life we now enjoy.  While I had hoped for more of an evolution of homemaking, what Bryson has produced is very much so in line with A Brief History of Nearly Everything - and as such much more focused on who invented the television and first thought to drill for oil than how people made their beds in the fourteenth century.  Bryson's style is easy to comprehend and his tone gives his books a wonderful personality. 

3.
Author: Bill Bryson
Title: A Short History of Nearly Everything
Publication: New York: Broadway Books, 2003.
Pages: 478, not counting notes
Genre: Nonfiction, science
Acquisition: Off my partner's shelf
Date Completed: January 13, 2010
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5

I believe it was Stasia that remarked that Bryson's book is anything but "short", and in 478 pages of general text he attempts to cover, well, nearly everything about our planet.

A Short History of Nearly Everything is highly regarded by several men I admire, including my grandfather, my partner, and his grandfather. Each has read Bryson's book a number of times, gaining new insight each time. They never fail to recommend the book to others, and I picked up the book this month fully prepared to be amazed.

Unfortunately, I am not as enthralled with Bryson's work as my relatives. The general writing of A Short History of Nearly Everything is interesting and easy to follow, and is directed towards a general audience that makes the book approachable as a whole. In terms of its content the book is a general glossing of all scientific studies, focusing largely on the questions of how and why our planet came to be, what keeps it going, and how it all ended up with us. My interest varied with each chapter; passages dedicated to subjects I already find interesting were informative and entertaining, but my attention drifted on subjects I either find dull or simply too outside my area of understanding.

I would recommend A Short History of Nearly Everything to those with an interest in reading general science books, but it may not hold your attention if you're more interested in the humanities.

Challenges
75-Book Challenge: Book 3
1010 Challenge: Nonfiction Book 1
Off-the-shelf: Book 6

14. Bryson, Bill. The Mother Tongue: English, and How it Got That Way. 245 pages. 2.12.09

Bill Bryson's The Mother Tongue is a delightful read suitable for any language enthusiast. While several readers have singled out the (apparently copious) errors in the book, I myself read it for its entertainment value only, and was not troubled by these technicalities. Though by no means a scholarly text, Bryson's book provides readers with a wealth of information and trivia; in less than 250 pages he touches on everything from dialects to dictionaries, crosswords to curse words. Each of the sixteen chapters is closely focused on a subject related to the use, history, or development of the English language (both in England and other English-speaking countries), and can be read (and judged) on its own merits. Likely written in the late 1980s, and published in 1990, some of Bryson's "modern" examples are a bit dated. However, most of his illustrations are historical in nature, which will allow several generations of readers to follow along with the same level of comprehension. Who knew that a book on spelling and grammar could be so entertaining?