Now, 20 years on and closing in on citizenship, Bryson decides to explore his adopted homeland again. “The Road to Little Dribbling” is a sequel to “Notes from a Small Island,” which came out in 1995 and recounted with wry curiosity the Iowan’s first encounters with a country that would soon give him both a wife and a career in journalism. It diminishes the book - the first of his career, for me, which is only an equivocal pleasure. “We live in a world that has practically no appreciation for quality, tradition, or classiness,” he writes early on, and virtually every page thereafter offers some variation on that glum assessment. Alas, “The Road to Little Dribbling,” his new account of travels around England (often by rail, in fact), has crossed it, the author’s tone for the first time no longer so much curmudgeonly as incurably sour. Until now, the wonderful American writer Bill Bryson has always stayed on the right side of that line, consistently a nostalgist, never a pessimist. You have to be careful when you look backward. The rails were what made it easier to cast light onto all the injustices of dim and distant places. Of course, it was also a time when 5-year-olds worked in factories. A simpler era, the feeling went, beer and accents stronger, and people moving only at the pace a horse could take them. In the 1880s, the English experienced an intense collective wistfulness for the period before 1850, which was the year that railroads had finally connected the country. The book has received mixed reviews.The world is always in decline if you want it to be. Both of these are iconic images of British sea-side culture and landscape, although geographically distant from one another. cover depicts The Jolly Fisherman of Skegness, skipping with the Seven Sisters in the background. He dubs this the "Bryson Line" and uses it as a rough basis for the route he travels in the book, concentrating mainly on places that he did not visit in Notes from a Small Island. In the opening chapters he notes that the straight line distance from Bognor Regis on the south coast to Cape Wrath in Scotland is the longest straight line one can travel in the UK without crossing any part of the sea. Twenty years after the publication of Notes From a Small Island, Bryson makes another journey around Great Britain to see what has changed.
The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes From a Small Island is a humorous travel book by American author Bill Bryson, first published in 2015.
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