I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away

You can't go wrong with a Bill Bryson book. I've read several, and they're all excellent. Bryson is mainly known as a travel writer. He was born in the midwest, but spent 20 years living in England, where he got married to a Brit and raised a family. (He even picked up a bit of a British accent, judging from the audio book version of In A Sunburned Country the he entertainingly read.)

When Bryson returned to the United States, one of his UK newspaper editors asked him to write a weekly column about what it was like to move back to America after two decades in the UK. This book, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away is a compilation of those columns. Bryson insightfully and hilariously (I had to suppress laughter while reading it late at night in bed so as not to wake up my wife) comments on everyday life in a small New England town. Excerpt:

Still, I can't criticize because I live in the state with the most demented of all license plate slogans, the strange and pugnacious "Live Free or Die." Perhaps I take these things too literally, but I really don't like driving around with an explicit written vow to expire if things don't go right. Frankly, I would prefer something a little more equivocal and less terminal-"Live Free or Pout" perhaps, or maybe "Live Free or Bitch Mightily to Anyone Who'll Listen."

All this is a somewhat circuitous way of introducing our important topic-namely, how boring it is to make a long car journey these days. If you have been following this space closely (and if not, why not?) you will recall that last week I discussed how we recently drove from New Hampshire to Ohio in order to deliver my eldest son to a university that had offered to house and educate him for the next four years in return for a sum of money not unadjacent to the cost of a moon launch.

What I didn't tell you then, because I didn't want to upset you on my first week back from vacation, is what a nightmare experience it was. Now please understand, I am as fond of my wife and children as the next man, no matter how much they cost me per annum in footwear and Nintendo games (which is, frankly, a lot), but that isn't to say that I wish to pass a week with them ever again in a sealed metal chamber on an American highway.

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