The Lost Continent

Bill Bryson is amazing. I can't wait to read all of his other books. I'm not quite done with this one, but wanted to share so of the best passages so far. His wit, sarcasm, and ebb and flow in pace are ideal for a book like this. If you've ever taken, or ever WANTED to take a cross country road trip, please read it. Being someone that has done that, it was exciting to read how his take on various places, like the Grand Canyon, were almost my words exactly for describing the experience, suggesting something very undeniable and universally moving about the oddities and beauties of the United States.

"The last time I had been in New York was when I was sixteen and my friend Stan and I came out to visit my brother and his wife, who were living there then. They had an apartment in a strange, Kafkaesque apartment complex in Queens called Lefrak City. It consisted of about a dozen identical tall, featureless buildings clustered around a series of lonesome quadrangles, the sort of quadrangles where rain puddles stand for weeks and the flowerbeds are littered with supermarket carts. Each building was like a vertical city, with its own grocery store, drugstore, laundromat and so on. I don't remember the details except that each building was taller than the tallest building in Des Moines and that the total population was something like 50,000--bigger than most Iowa towns. I had never conceived of so many people gathered in one place. I couldn't understand why in such a big, open, country as America people would choose to live like that. It wasn't as if this were something temporary, a place to spend a few months while waiting for their ranch house in the suburbs to be built. This was home. This was it. Thousands and thousands of people would live out their lives never having their own backyard, never having a barbecue, never stepping out the back door at midnight to have a pee in the bushes and check out the stars. Their children would grow up thinking that supermarket carts grew wild, like weeds."

and in Vermont...
"One village I went through had about four stores and one of them was a Ralph Lauren Polo Shop. I couldn't think of anything worse than living in a place where you could buy a$200 sweater but not a can of baked beans. Actually, I could think of a lot of worse things--cancer of the brain, watching every episode of a TV miniseries starring Joan Collins, having to eat at a Burger Chef more than twice in one year, reaching for a glass of water in the middle of the night and finding that you've just taken a drink from your grandmother's denture cup, and so on. But I think you get my point."

and in Amish country...
"Travel articles and movies like Witness generally gloss over this side of things, but the fact is that Lancaster County is now one of the most awful places in America, especially on weekends when traffic jams sometimes stretch for miles. Many of the Amish themselves have given up and moved to places like Iowa and upper Michigan where they are left alone. Out in the countryside, particularly on the back roads, you can still sometimes see the people in their funny dark clothes working in the fields or driving their distinctive black buggies down the highway, with a long line of tourist cars creeping along behind, pissed off because they can't get by and they really want to be in a Bird in Hand so that they can get some more funnel cakes and SnoCones and perhaps buy a wrought-iron wine rack or combination mailbox-weather vane to take back home to Fartville with them. I wouldn't be surprised if a decade from now there isn't a real Amish person left in the country."

-The Lost Continent, Bill Bryson