An Amazon Best Book of January 2016: The Road to Little Dribbling comes twenty years after Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island, in which he first described his love affair with his adopted Great Britain. That first book was laugh-out-loud funny, and so is this one. It opens with Bryson describing (hilariously) the perils of growing older, eventually revealing the author’s successful passing of the Life in Britain Knowledge Test (thus, making him a British citizen). The rest of the book follows that pattern: Bryson describes getting older, and he describes Great Britain via a trip he took across the 700 mile long island. While he tried to avoid places he visited in Notes from a Small Island—he does revisit Dover—those who read the first book will enjoy a welcome sense of the familiar—even if Bryson appears to have grown a little more cynical and angry with age. But give the guy a break: the world is changing, even his beloved “cozy and embraceable” island. And as he writes in the book, “I recently realized with dismay that I am even too old for early onset dementia. Any dementia I get will be right on time.” --Chris Schluep
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