{"id":69,"date":"2001-12-01T12:28:05","date_gmt":"2001-12-01T17:28:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog-test\/?p=69"},"modified":"2001-12-01T12:28:05","modified_gmt":"2001-12-01T17:28:05","slug":"bryson_bill_not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2001\/12\/bryson_bill_not\/","title":{"rendered":"Bryson, Bill: Notes from a Small Island"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name=\"7558939\"><\/a> <a name=\"link_7558939\"><\/a> <\/p>\n<p>Bought a copy of <strong>Bill Bryson&#8217;s <cite>Notes from a Small Island<\/cite><\/strong> as a birthday present for a friend now studying in London (who I doubt reads this, but if I&#8217;m wrong, ummm, hi, Laura). Though I have scruples about reading books that are gifts to other people, these don&#8217;t extend to books I&#8217;ve read before; thus, I flipped through it at lunch yesterday looking for the good bits (besides, this way it will be fresh in my mind so I can have a conversation with Laura about it).<\/p>\n<p>I like the extremes about this book best: the details like <cite>This is Cinerama<\/cite>, the fifth Duke of Portland, and the dead-on description of what it&#8217;s like to visit Stonehenge (though Bryson apparently missed out on juggling, in the bitter cold, an umbrella, a camera, and an oversized cell phone-thing that squawks a tinny audio tour), and the overall sense of &#8220;yeah, that <em>is<\/em> what it&#8217;s like to live there.&#8221; A lot of the places mentioned I never went to in the three months I was there and don&#8217;t particularly want to go to, but I did enjoy living there and would like to visit again someday. For now, though, this will do as a nostalgia fix.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bought a copy of Bill Bryson&#8217;s Notes from a Small Island as a birthday present for a friend now studying in London (who I doubt reads this, but if I&#8217;m wrong, ummm, hi, Laura). Though I have scruples about reading books that are gifts to other people, these don&#8217;t extend to books I&#8217;ve read before; &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2001\/12\/bryson_bill_not\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Bryson, Bill: Notes from a Small Island&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,9],"tags":[144],"class_list":["post-69","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-non-fiction","tag-bryson-bill"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}