I have very recently finished reading "I'm a Stranger Here Myself" by Bill Bryson, and have come here to blog about it. I enjoyed the entirety of the book very much, and wished it would have gone on longer, with more columns. Bryson ended his collection of columns with a nice one wrapping up the gist of everything he felt about America, and the experience he had when first trying to move here. As for any major developments in the book since my last blog, there have been none. The structure has been majorly the same, with the same general messages throughout (America is a land of extreme variety, complexity, and excess), though not to say I enjoyed it any less.
As for a line between fiction and non-fiction, there was not really one present here. The characters were all real, set in real settings, going through events that actually happened. This book was entirely factual, with one exception. Each story had a theme, a message it tried to send, which was the point of the story, beyond simply retelling events. Many reoccurring messages were somewhat cliche things, like enjoy every day and don't let the past bring you down, but there were a many unique ones, each with there own interesting message.
One article I particularly enjoyed from the second half of this book was one in which Bryson talked about the seeming increase in absentmindedness and forgetfulness he experienced as he got older. This article was decidedly different than most of the other's about America's infatuation with excess and variety. The article itself, like all the others, was composed of funny anecdotes and witty insights, but it was still fundamentally different, and, I thought, somewhat more enjoyable for this. Overall, I truly and greatly enjoyed the book, and can't ait to eventually read more from Bill Bryson.
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