The Literary Equivalent of a "Junk Drawer"

Normally, I like to wait until I'm completely finished with a book before doing a blog post about it, but something struck me about a chapter and a half into Bill Bryson's At Home, and I just had to say something.

The subtitle of the book is A Short History of Private Life, and the premise is that Bryson has written "a fascinating history of the modern home, taking us on a room-by-room tour through his own house and using each room to explore the vast history of the domestic artifacts we take for granted" (from the description on Amazon). Sounds pretty straightforward, right? It is anything but!

Every home has a "junk" drawer, in which all kinds of miscellaneous items accumulate. Sometimes the items center around a theme, like a kitchen drawer that has anything from bread twist ties to the instruction manuals for various appliances to cheesecloth scraps to pills for lactose intolerance. Other times it is just random stuff that has somehow ended up in one place. When you finally get around to decluttering, you may find something fascinating.

Bryson's book is kind of like that. In chapter 1, he lays out the idea for the book - a tour of his home with background and history of how each feature came to be part of a modern house. He then proceeds to talk about: 1) the Crystal Palace in 1851 London; 2) the history of glass; 3) vicars and rectors in the Anglican church and their various side hobbies; 4) Skara Brae in Scotland's Orkney Islands; 5) the transition from hunting/gathering to agriculture; 6) the development of maize/corn and potatoes from wild plants to their domesticated, modern version; 7) the discovery of Catalhoyuk in Turkey; 8) an early influential archeologist and his mysterious death; 9) the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. I've just started chapter 3 and he has yet to say anything about the house!

Don't get me wrong - I'm not complaining. It's all really interesting, and Bryson has a flow to his writing that makes all these disparate threads make sense together. It's like listening to a wonderful conversationalist who knows something about everything and who also just happens to have the world's worst case of distractibility. I'm sure he will eventually get around to talking about modern homes. And the trip to get there is going to be filled with all sorts of treasures from the "junk drawer"!