I absolutely LOVED Bill Bryson’s a short history of everything - he manages to make the most complicated science easy to really understand, be completely fascinating, and incredibly funny at the same time.
As someone who once had the chutzpah to enter the Royal Society's Science Prize- with a poetic anti-Darwin tracing of the history of inspiration (Involution... I know, not science in 2013) this extract from Bill Bryson's Everything, gives real hope. Certainly elegantly economical prose, but, more importantly, somewhat irreverent. A crack in the straight face. Almost a delighted smile. It's a start.
loved Bill Bryson’s “At Home” with strange passion, -some books, I love more intimately, as if they were written for me only; and these, I tend to keep silent about, as if hiding them jealously, it makes no sense, I know . Other books though, I love so much I indeed can’t stop blabbering about them; I want so to share I become ridiculous; it’s some other kind of love. You want to read it aloud when you read. That’s what happenned with “At Home”.
I knew Bryson is an author of several more bestsellers, but I gave myself some time before I read some of them. It’s like I wanted to keep to my joy from ‘At Home” for longer.
Your post makes me think I might be ready.
Thank you-and thank you for the rest of the list, of course.
Excellent. Top pick!
I absolutely LOVED Bill Bryson’s a short history of everything - he manages to make the most complicated science easy to really understand, be completely fascinating, and incredibly funny at the same time.
I love Bill Bryson! He's occasionally made me feel hopeful against my will.
As someone who once had the chutzpah to enter the Royal Society's Science Prize- with a poetic anti-Darwin tracing of the history of inspiration (Involution... I know, not science in 2013) this extract from Bill Bryson's Everything, gives real hope. Certainly elegantly economical prose, but, more importantly, somewhat irreverent. A crack in the straight face. Almost a delighted smile. It's a start.
'A crack in the straight face.'
And someday all nonfiction writers will face a well-deserved lynching if they don't have this.
loved Bill Bryson’s “At Home” with strange passion, -some books, I love more intimately, as if they were written for me only; and these, I tend to keep silent about, as if hiding them jealously, it makes no sense, I know . Other books though, I love so much I indeed can’t stop blabbering about them; I want so to share I become ridiculous; it’s some other kind of love. You want to read it aloud when you read. That’s what happenned with “At Home”.
I knew Bryson is an author of several more bestsellers, but I gave myself some time before I read some of them. It’s like I wanted to keep to my joy from ‘At Home” for longer.
Your post makes me think I might be ready.
Thank you-and thank you for the rest of the list, of course.
Thanks, Chen.
One blessed day science writers will be forced at gunpoint to take the care over their sentences that Bryson does.