The Grouchy Editor

by Bill Bryson

Bryson’s latest book is half travelogue, half opportunity to dish on British history, pop culture, and modern denizens – which is a good thing, because that dishing is where Road mines its abundant humor and charm. The book is a follow-up to Bryson’s 1995 hit, Notes from a Small Island, in which the author crisscrossed the United Kingdom, taking notes and offering an American expatriate’s observations.

Pros:  Bryson’s encounters with locals, especially rural locals, are often laugh-out-loud funny, particularly the dialogue as he recalls it. And his enthusiasm for English landmarks and historical figures is contagious. I’ve never been to England, but this book makes me want to visit – and walk everywhere once I’m there. Man, does Bryson love to walk.

Cons:  Bryson occasionally succumbs to “Get Off My Lawn!” syndrome, in which the grumpy geezer believes everything and every place was better years ago, during his youth, and isn’t afraid to say so. In modern Britain, Bryson carps, litter is everywhere, youth are increasingly boorish, and government projects are misguided. All of that could be true, but I sometimes got the feeling that what Bryson misses more than the England of his youth is the Bill Bryson of his youth.

Inexplicably, toward the end of the book, Bryson feels compelled to vent about his country of origin, decrying the “stupidity” of Americans in general, and conservative Americans in particular. Out of the blue, the author also decides to share his feelings about hot-button political issues of the day.

Am I interested in Bryson’s take on gun control and immigration? Sure, why not. But in a book in which 99 percent of the grumbling is about irksome potholes and overpriced cups of coffee, switching gears to Bryson’s political convictions is out of sync and leaves a sour taste in an otherwise delightful read.

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Agatha Christie

It’s an Agatha Christie mystery, so you know the drill: Someone gets murdered, the police are baffled, and so Hercule Poirot twirls his mustache and solves the crime.

There are a couple of unusual aspects to this Poirot outing, which was published in 1963, some 43 years after Christie introduced the persnickety detective. For one, I think the author might have been tiring of Poirot, because he’s barely in this novel. I think Christie might also have been impressed by a certain Alfred Hitchcock movie, because Clocks features a witness in an apartment across the street from the murder scene, a girl who is confined to her room by a broken leg and who spends much of the day spying on her neighbors with binoculars. Sound familiar?

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Malcolm Gladwell

How much you enjoy the essays in Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw could depend on how much you care about whichever subject he’s discussing. The New Yorker journalist gets praised for the clarity of his prose, but to me it doesn’t matter how accessible the writing is when the topic is ketchup.  I still fall asleep.

I am also unmoved by Gladwell’s stories about successfully marketing hair dye and vegetable slicers and the masterminds behind their advertising campaigns. Sorry, but a tag-team of Stephen King and J. K. Rowling would fail to hold my interest if the topic is peddling mustard.

On the other hand, when Gladwell turns his attention to the psychology of criminal profiling, or to the root cause of homelessness, his counterintuitive conclusions are often surprising and sometimes enlightening.

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Wilkie Collins

I do love me some Victorian literature. Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes — masterful writers, all of them.  The Woman in White, published in 1859 by England’s Wilkie Collins, is not one of my favorites from that era, but it does have its charms.

The plot:  A pair of plucky Britons does battle with an evil Italian spy when the corpulent con artist attempts to swindle a young heiress by replacing her with a lookalike impostor.

What I liked:  The lengthy melodrama was initially published in serial form, and it’s easy to see how magazine readers of the day got hooked. Collins is a master at building slow-burn suspense: It can be a bit of a slog on the way to a chapter’s climax but, once you get there, the payoff is often rewarding. Collins also introduces a villain for the ages in the egotistical, silver-tongued Count Fosco.

What I didn’t like:  The youthful heroes aren’t nearly as interesting as the malevolent count. The beautiful heiress is typical of so many “damsels in distress” found in Victorian literature, a fragile specimen who faints at the slightest provocation and must be shielded from anything and everything remotely unpleasant. (She’s an apparent precursor to some of today’s college students, with their “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces.”) Here is one passage describing the precious snowflake that is Lady Glyde:

“The effect of the good news on poor Lady Glyde was, I grieve to say, quite overpowering. She was too weak to bear the violent reaction, and in another day or two she sank into a state of debility and depression which obliged her to keep her room. Rest and quiet, and change of air afterwards, were the best remedies which Mr. Dawson could suggest for her benefit.”

And that’s how she reacts to the good news.

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)