At Home

Bill Bryson, a favorite author of mine, looks around his house and wonders where everything came from. The house in question is rectory dating from 1851 in some out-of-the-way spot in England. From the hall, to the kitchen, to the drawing room, bedroom, attic, and more, Bryson expounds on the history behind many different things that we now take for granted. It's wonderfully informative and fascinating stuff. How often can you say you breezed through a 700-page non-fiction book? Well, I did just now. There is a wealth of fascinating – sometimes amazing – facts within. For instance:

> Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plant thought to exist on earth, just eleven – corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, casava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats – account for account for 93 per cent of all that humans eat, and every one of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors.

> Your bed, if it is averagely clean, averagely old, averagely dimensioned... is likely to be home to some two million tiny bed mites, too small to be seen with the naked eye. It's been calculated that if your pillow is six years old, one-tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living and dead mites, and mite dung.

> The cleanest surface in the average house is the toilet seat; the fithiest object is the kitchen wash cloth.

> Today it takes the average citizen of Tanzania almost a year to produce the same volume of carbon emissions as is effortlessly generation every two and a half days by a European, or every twenty-eight hours by an American.

Most of the chapters in the book are named after rooms in the house. In some cases, Bryson barely touches on the significance of the room but instead launches into some compelling story from history about private life. The book is full of curious characters from history, some well-known and others largely forgotten. Many of these passages are taken from the Victorian era and one quickly counts oneself lucky not to have lived in that time. This book was highly enjoyable.