Finished reading Bill Bryson’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself my first afternoon in Austin. It’s a collection of newspaper columns did right after moving back to America after two decades of living in the U.K. The subject matter’s rather uninspired (New England winters, inscrutable forms from the IRS) but Bryson manages to give each of them his own askewing. I didn’t crack up the way I did reading The Lost Continent but I tittered the whole time. Thoroughly enjoyable.
The book had served as my toilet book back home and I read one piece at a time while other business went on. I brought it along in case I tired of the workish books I had brought. But I’m on vacation and I read what suits me in the moment. So Bill Bryson followed me to lunch, the grocery store and to a beat-up chair at Bookpeople, a super-duper independent bookstore. I read the last essay while eyeing a towering shelf of Western Novelists, mostly unseen in the Republic of San Francisco. I haven’t read any myself but a fellow named Elmer Kelton has written about 113 of them, each with a cover so full of horses and mountainous beauty that they look like they’re ready to gallop off the shelf at any moment.
