"A Short History of Nearly Everything" entry #1

author: Bill Bryson, published: 2003 and 2004

I chose this book because I have read a book by Bill Bryson before, "A Walk in the Woods" and found it utterly amusing and I was under the assumption that this book would be funny too. I expected the book to be slightly more brief and not so dry- but this book is proving to be sleep inducing despite the varying topics that have the possibility of being interesting. Some of the topics that Bryson talks about in themselves are interesting but overall he takes far too long to explain himself and therefore you forget the point that he's trying to make by the end of a chapter because he takes so long just to get to a point. Also what makes his writing even more confusing is that he doesn't always tell you the time period when he's talking about the topic of interest so as to give you an idea of the historical period. On the positive side though, Bryson writes the book in a perspective that makes you feel like as if you are there, and witnessing things as they occur (and that's when his points or his topics prove to be interesting) or that he knew the people that he talks about really well (when you know that he couldn't have known them- because they lived hundreds of years ago).

So far Bryson has been talking about various scientific topics such as stars, how they are formed, the circumference of our planet, the weight of our planet, the possibility of life, the contributions of various scientists throughout the lifetimes, the size of our solar system, the size of our galaxy, the topics that Bryson mentions are endless as well as extremely detailed. Whenever Bryson mentions a new topic, he always goes into detail about that topic no matter how trivial that topic maybe, true fully it's mind-boggling. Bryson does a good job though explaining and simplifying scientific topics extremely well, so I am under the assumption that Bryson is writing to an audience that doesn't normally read scientific texts or journals that go into the topic of interest extensively. Because Bryson writes this way, the topic of interest makes sense in that you know what he's talking about but because he sometimes goes into too much detail, you don't always realize or understand the point he's trying to make.