A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

This book covers an immense canvas – the whole universe, really. Fortunately (or un- depending on how you think), most of what we know is about our own planet, and a great deal of the book is spent on Earth and it’s many inhabitants.

This took me quite a while to read, as it’s not a book to just casually breeze through. I found myself re-reading certain paragraphs and even backtracking to a previous chapter to make sure I understood something, but once the groundwork is laid everything is within grasp to understand.

What I did find was that I was quoting parts of it to friends and family, and most people that I talked to seemed fairly interested once they heard some of the contents. Don’t be put off if you aren’t exactly a “science type”, because if you live on this planet (as most of us do) this book is as close as you can come to The Manual for Earth.

Bryson also makes it an enjoyable read with his right-on-the-mark humour and way of describing everything with minimal fuss. So while it did take me a long time to get through the book, it will be something that I’ll recommend to everybody for a long time to come.