The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain

The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain by Bill Bryson, 380 pages.

Bryson reflects on and follows his classic 1993 Notes from a Small Island with an updated tour of Great Britain. I've read several of Bryson's books before, A Brief History of Nearly Everything, Home, and The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, but I haven't read any of his other travel books, and I don't remember him being this funny. He is really funny in The Road, in an updated, profane, Andy Rooney sort of way. His imagined dialogues with shop clerks, barkeeps and hoteliers are evil and sharp and funny. Sometimes he seems a little whiny, or self-indulgent, but then he realizes it and makes fun of that too, and it's all better.
He rips into the English (or at least certain English) for their peculiarities, their foibles, and their lack of a sense of humor (though his family and the staff of at least one McDonalds don't seem to get him either), but he does proclaim his love for his adopted home and its inhabitants. Published a year or so before the Brexit vote, it will be interesting to read his take on that, and see his adjustment on his take on the xenophobia of the English. A very fun read, and the audio is well read and features a bonus song, "The Bryson Line," which includes the line, "Great Britain is great, let's not be pedantic, the North Sea's in the east, the Irish Sea's the Atlantic".