Notes from a Big Country by Bill Bryson
travel/biography
399 pages, ISBN: 0-552-99386-2
Published by: Black Swan 1999 (First published by Doubleday 1998)
Review scribbled down on the 9th of January, 2000
I rate this book 9/10: **********

You can find other peoples opinions of this book at Amazon's websites (where you also can order the book):
Read more about the book (and buy it) at Amazon.co.uk (Europe)'s page about the book

My first review in the year of 2000. Bill Bryson has now moved back to USA, and this book consists of columns he wrote for Mail on Sunday's magazine "Night & Day".
78 columns are collected in this book, all more or less amusing observations of the mysterious behaviour of people in USA. Naturally all of the stories are about the differences between USA and UK, for example that Americans take their car wherever they are going; even if it's only a block down the street, how the Americans love to have a variety of choices for everything, how everyone is happy to sue each other on basically no grounds at all, that irony is an unknown concept and all personal that have anything to do with aeroplanes are the devils' servants.
Brysons' strength is that he manages to capture all those little details that oneself ponder on from time to time. I have to get my hands on more books by Bill Bryson since they are most surely the funniest books I've read in a long time.
And in particular: "Notes from a Big Country" is certainly the funniest and best book I have read so far this year :)

See also these humourous books about travels: My review of Lonely Planet Unpacked My review of Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island.

Adrian Mole - the Cappuccino Years by Sue Townsend
fiction
391 pages, ISBN: 0-7181-4367-1
First published by: The Penguin Group 1999
Review scribbled down on the 11th of January, 2000
I rate this book 7/10: **********

You can find other peoples opinions of this book at Amazon's websites (where you also can order the book):
Read more about the book (and buy it) at Amazon.co.uk (Europe)'s and Amazon.com (USA)'s pages about the book

Several years ago I read a book about Adrian Mole, and I found bits and pieces of it funny. So after seeing the advertisment in the underground every morning I decided to get "Adrian Mole - The ...". The whole book (as with the other books about Adrian Mole) is written like a diary. You will follow him, now in his thirties, as he struggles as a chef at a rather shabby restaurant. He is now divorced and have a two year old son, which his parents has to look after. He still has got a crush for Pandora, and still manages to get into pathetic situations. His literary ambitions are still strong and he tries to get BBC to make something out of his script for a humourous tv-series about a serial-killer. Much things goes wrong and nothing goes the way Adrian expects it to go. It was quite a pleasent reunion. The only problem is that as with the other books, it does not really come to a proper ending, but since it's written in the form of a diary, it is not that much to do about it. I will most certainly get the next novel, if there will be one about Adrian Mole.

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