I read some of the more outrageous tidbits to my husband, who pretty much refuses to believe that they’re true. They always say that truth is stranger than fiction. I’m now full of trivia about all kinds of things that could even remotely be considered to have anything to do with private life. I am not a huge fan of non-fiction, so I don’t know that I could really have enjoyed this as much if I had read it straight through with no breaks, but as an in-between book, I really enjoyed it. But I promise you it all flows together, and it’s all interesting in the way that only Bill Bryson can pull off. “The nursery” goes from childbirth to child labor to poor house conditions to the repression of wealthy children to conditions at boarding schools. It all flowed together naturally and I only questioned how I had gotten to one subject if I really stopped to think about a particular chapter title. It’s roughly arranged by room, but my gosh, it travels around on some tangents. But at least now I know who invented the traps my husband set out! Reading about how ingenious rats are as I hear the pitter-pat of little rodent feet in my attic space is not necessarily a good idea. I read this slowly as my before-bed book, and I’m not sure that was always a good idea. Bill Bryson looked around his house one day, realized how little he knew about the everyday objects surrounding him, and, being Bill Bryson, decided to research and write a book about them. And he discovered that, although there may seem to be nothing as unremarkable as our domestic lives, there is a huge amount of history, interest and excitement - and even a little danger - lurking in the corners of every home.We take so much in our daily lives for granted. And that most of the key discoveries for humankind can be found in the very fabric of the houses in which we live.This inspired him to start a journey around his own house, an old rectory in Norfolk, wandering from room to room considering how the ordinary things in life came to be.Īlong the way he did a prodigious amount of research on the history of anything and everything, from architecture to electricity, from food preservation to epidemics, from the spice trade to the Eiffel Tower, from crinolines to toilets and on the brilliant, creative and often eccentric minds behind them. Bill Bryson was struck one day by the thought that we devote a lot more time to studying the battles and wars of history than to considering what history really consists of: centuries of people quietly going about their daily business - eating, sleeping and merely endeavouring to get more comfortable.

At Home by Bill Bryson