I finished Bill Bryson’s “A Walk in the Woods” yesterday.
Reading Bryson is comfort food. Comforting writing?
This is not disparaging in the slightest. Bryson is a warm crackling fire on a winters night.
He’s a great writer, and his topics are interesting, but reading him is very comforting. And I’m sure zillions of people would agree. He moves books.
I probably have two comfort writers.
Bill Bryson and David Sedaris.
I reread Sedaris mostly at Christmas time, at night, when things are calm, when I need to feel calm.
I reread Sedaris a ton during the pandemic. Just to escape into his stories for a few hours. Sedaris makes you feel like your in on the joke. Your in the club, a part of the family, a close friend and confidant.
Rereading Bryson makes you feel smart. You feel like you’re learning the history of a thing or a place. And maybe you are, but really, you want to see what kind of situation he gets himself into and what he says about it. You want to see what kind of crazy story he will tell about a historical figure or situation. It’s the stories AND the history. His travel writing might be his most comforting.
I guess it’s the wit of both writers.
Sometimes laugh out loud funny, but more often it’s a chuckle at something outlandish or something disgusting, just slipped into the history of something in the case of Bryson or slipped into a story by Sedaris.
And you can’t grab your wife and retell the line, because the chuckle requires pages and pages of context.
Both of their writings is a lot like the set of a comedian.
The writing is honed. The rough edges removed. It’s tailored for the desired reaction. Carefully. Optimized. Meticulously.
I believe that Sedaris does this through relentless retellings in front of live audiences to see what lines work, what stories work, what language works.
I have no idea how Bryson does this. Perhaps in his head?
What’s frightening is that both writers are getting older. New books will stop flowing from these tellers of tales soon and that will be terrible.