At Home

One of my winter reads this year was a Christmas gift from my SIL, At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson.  Apparently, Bryson is better known for his book A Short History of Nearly Everything, but I figure I needed a warm-up to a book titled like that anyway.

At Home focuses on giving background history on all the features and oddities of a home, in particularly the author's particular house.  It is hardly well-focused in this effort, but thankfully so as you might imagine.  Bryson uses each room in a house simply as a springboard for rambling on about related history.  But "rambling" is not quite the right word because it is much more enjoyable to read than that makes it sound. It is more attune to having a conversation over a beer with a friend who spends way too much time reading Wikipedia.  In the same way surfing Wikipedia leads you to reading articles link-by-link until you can no longer remember what you even started researching, Bryson's storytelling follows the natural path of your curiosity as you learn the history of the commonplace.

Beyond being simply entertained, I enjoyed At Home on a more meaningful level as well.  Learning the evolution of the everyday life of humans, instead of the the usual focus on major events, gives you an unsettling awareness of how easily our perspectives on God and life are distorted by our limited vantage point.  From our own position in time and place it is all too easy to draw out interpretations and opinions that are valueless when you attempt to transpose them.