Smitchy's Reviews > At Home: A Short History of Private Life

When a friend saw this on my 2018 reading challenge they said that this was "interesting, but not my favourite Bryson book" and after finishing it I fully understand what they meant. This book is interesting in a randomly scattered, QI-facty, sort of way. There isn't really an overall plot - Bryson rambles from topic to topic as he wanders through his house; covering varied subjects from windows, to books, to plague, to wigs, to cremation, to surgery, to country pastors and their contributions to science, and so many more it is impossible to list them all.
Using his own house as a starting point, Bryson looks into the history of european / western domesticity with his usual thoroughness. There are many strange happenings and inventions that have gone into making our homes what they are today. In the rooms we take for granted, and the basic services of power and water, there is a wealth of innovation, suffering, and disasters - Bryson goes into them all in (occasionally very) gory detail (I had to skip through one description of a mastectomy performed in the pre-anethestic era!).

Overall this was interesting but too rambling to really settle into for a good read - If you want to read Bill Bryson I recommend "A Walk in the Woods" or "A Short History of Nearly Everything" over "At Home".