A Little Tale of Non-Fiction (1)

Are you bored of Love Stories and Thrillers?
After a long day's work, you find it very hard to grasp a piece of "Heavy" Literature yet you believe you deserve more than Harry Potter?

May be you should try to give it a go with a non-fiction book.

There are a lot of advantages to non-fiction over fiction books; especially, in our contemporary life style. A non-fiction does not require commitment as a novel for example. It is normally divided into more or less individual chapters or at least subject matter. So the reader might read till a certain section then stops till he feels like resuming. (I tried this once while reading Lord of the Rings. Then when I tried to get back to reading a month later it was an absolute nightmare. I did not know who's who, lost the story line and had to retract a 100 pages or so just to get back on line again...)

Furthermore, a good non-fiction will probably, actually, add concrete pieces of knowledge to its reader.

Anyway, this mini-series is really based on nothing except some very limited readings I had over the last couple of years of a few of those authors and books. Here we go...

Bill Bryson:

One of the most loved writers for in the last part of the 20th Century. He was born in the States in 1951, in a little city in the state of Iowa.
His first travel book starts with just that "I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to."

Bryson dropped out of University to Backpack travel in Europe. These travels later on became the source of his first travel book "Neither Here Nor There"
In 1973, he got a job in England and met his wife. They got married and lived in the UK till 1995.
Up till 1987, Bryson was working mainly as a journalist (The Times and The Independent) and then started writing independently. He moved back and forth from The States to The UK and is now living in Norfolk, UK.

Perhaps the Most known work of Bryson is a "Short History of Nearly Everything." This Rough guide to Science is full of Humor in addition to some very important scientific facts. It is not just about science and scientific status. It also contains a whole lot of exciting information about the lives of many scientists, their backgrounds and often funny beginnings (or endings.) For example, we learn that Hubble (Famous Astronomer who gave his name to the Hubble Telescope) was not on very good terms with his wife. After his death, she took his body and buried it in an unknown place. No one knows where Hubble is buried till today. Or, something like: On the average everyday an American ends up dead by drowning in his own bathtub. The book goes on and on. It is one of the few books that I read may be for three times.
The book won the prestigious Aventis Award in 2004.

Bryson wrote 3 books on the English Language "Mother Tongue", "Made in America" and "Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words." These works were also greatly popular though criticized by academic critics for some of their mythical/misguided facts.

Currently, I'm reading two of his works. "Shakespeare: The World is a Stage."
In this small book, an attempt is made to shed some light on the very mysterious personal life of perhaps the greatest author in the English Language; although some very little facts are known about his life. "We do not know if he ever left England. We do not know who were his principal companions were or how he amused himself... On only a handful of days in his life can we say with absolute certainty where he was... For the rest, he is a kind of literary equivalent of an electron - forever there and not there."

The other book is "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid."
In this book, Bryson is making a very witty account of his years as a child growing up in the America in the 1950's.
"By 1951, when I came sliding down the chute, almost 90 per cent of the American families had refrigerators, and nearly three quarters had washing machines, telephones, vacuum cleaners and gas or electric stoves - things that most of the world could still only fantasize about... In early December, his wife (referring to Bryson's mom) went into Mercy hospital and with very little fuss gave birth to a baby boy: their third child, second son, first superhero."

In short, it is all in the way it is told. Any subject tackled by Bill Bryson becomes humorous, witty and exciting. He is the kind of writer, I would have dreamed of becoming. I became a construction engineer instead. Well, no one said that this world is fair after all...