I spent the whole of February leisurely meandering my way through this book. I have been having some sleep issues of late, and I found reading a chapter of At Home just before bedtime really knocked me out 😀.
That doesn’t mean At Home was boring. It just means that not having to follow a plot (because there is none) was strangely relaxing for me. So, if there’s no plot, what’s the book about?
Book Synopsis
Bill Bryson and his family live in a Victorian parsonage in a part of England where nothing of any great significance has happened since the Romans decamped.
Yet one day, he began to consider how very little he knew about the ordinary things of life as he found it in that comfortable home.
To remedy this, he formed the idea of journeying about his house from room to room to “write a history of the world without leaving home.”
The bathroom provides the occasion for a history of hygiene; the bedroom, sex, death, and sleep; the kitchen, nutrition and the spice trade; and so on. Whatever happens in the world, ends up in our house, in the paint and the pipes and the pillows and every item of furniture.
My Review
I am a history buff and I get nerdy about small, obscure facts so this book worked quite well for me. Before this book, I never really thought much about how our homes developed. I guess I took it all for granted. But after reading At Home, I now really appreciate all the evolution that happened to get us to this state of civilisation and comfort.
If you had to summarise it in one sentence, the history of domestic life is the history of getting comfortable slowly.
Bryson has structured his book according to the rooms in his house – bedroom, drawing room, hall etc. And each chapter deals with how life dealing with that part of the home developed. In theory, this is a fabulous structure. But in actuality, it fails to control Bryson’s tendency to meander.
And meander he does – a topic about the history of scientific progress can get mixed up with some unfairly neglected (as he puts it) minor historical figure, before he gets back on track. I needed a lot of patience to get through this book.
Still, in between some boring anecdotes, there are interesting and often hilarious factoids. I loved this one about sugar.
Even though sugar was very expensive, people consumed it till their teeth turned black, and if their teeth didn’t turn black naturally, they blackened them artificially to show how wealthy and marvellously self-indulgent they were.
Snippets like the one above made his meandering tolerable for me.
This book deals primarily with the USA and Britain, so houses/development in other parts of the world get short shrift. I would have liked it more if some of the more boring anecdotes were cut out and instead it included more factoids from some other parts of the world as well.
