Bookraft

Bill Bryson is master of humorous deceit - he poses as a wimp. You know - the one who always loses the argument by declaring a truce. The everyman who can barely cope with modern technology let alone political and social change. The one who gets himself in trouble by taking his family to a Drive in Movie 20 years past its time. The Don Quixote trying to jibe through air travel check in counters without a Pancho Sanchez. The man who revels in the absurdity of government forms and processes. et cetera, et cetera, et cetera - as the King and he would be wont to say.

But of course with his armed and dangerous tarted tongue ... well as his sainted British wife says - its beech beech beech all the time. And she is not talking about England's national tree. However what make this audio book collection of short stories even more entertaining is that you get to hear the stories as read by the humorist himself. Now this is important because with humour there is tone, pace and timing that commas and other punctuation just hint at. Better is to hear directly from the author the little white lies to the Maytag repairman that progress and grow into gigantic, mouth-watering balderdash and consequently doom him to a repair bill of equally grand proportions. Or listen how to fill out the forms to get his taxes - inevitably you are adding the drool of your second born but only if line item 43G on the form Raising your Kids and Hackles is properly completed in triplicate.

In short the ponderously absurd of the American World that Bill Bryson has come home to after a 20 year sojourn in England - this is the stuff of Neither Here nor There and I'm a Stranger Here Myself. Readers caught a hint of this in Bryson's tale of completing the Appalachian Trail - A Walk in the Woods (also great laugh out loud comic reading). But nowhere is this American deja vu, presqu vu, and parfois vu more rampant and rambunctuously mixed than in this Salad of Collected Humours.