something to which i can aspire...

bill bryson is fantastic. in the following passage from his memoir about growing up in the 50s, the life and times of the thunderbolt kid, he fondly recalls his days of constructing models...

"at least candy gave actual pleasure. most things that were supposed to be fun turned out to be not fun at all. model making, for instance. making models was reputed to be hugely enjoyable but it was really just a mysterious ordeal that you had to go through from time to time as part of the boyhood process. the model kits looked fun. the illustrations on the boxes portrayed beautifully detailed fighter pilots belching red-and-yellow flames from their wing guns and engaged in lively dogfights. in the background there was always a stricken messerschmitt spiraling to earth with a dismayed german in the cockpit, shouting bitter epithets through the windscreen. you couldn't wait to recreate such lively scenes in three dimensions.

"but when you got the kit home and opened the box the contents turned out to be of a uniform leaden gray or olive green, consisting of perhaps sixty thousand tiny parts, some no larger than a proton, all attached in some organic, inseparable way to plastic stalks like swizzle sticks. the tubes of glue by contrast were the size of pretty large pastry tubes. no matter how gently you depressed them they would blurp out a pint or so of a clear viscous goo whose one instinct was to attach itself to some foreign object--a human finger, the living-room drapes, the fur of a passing animal--and become an infinitely long string.

"any attempt to break the string resulted in the creation of more strings. within moments you would be attached to hundreds of sagging strands, all connected to something that had nothing to do with model airplanes or world war II. the only thing the glue wouldn't stick to, interestingly, was a piece of plastic model; then it just became a slippery lubricant that allowed any two pieces of model to glide endlessly over each other; never drying. the upshot was that after about forty minutes of intensive but troubled endeavor you and your immediate surroundings were covered in a glistening spiderweb of glue at the heart of which was a gray fuselage with one wing on upside down and a pilot accidentally but irremediably attached by his flying cap to the cockpit ceiling. happily by this point you were so high on the glue that you didn't give a shit about the pilot, the model, or anything else."


though it is possible you and you editor have some slight verb agreement deficiencies and a loathing for commas that i do not share, you are wonderful bill bryson and i beseech you to write more. a lot more. in the meantime, i will read your novels that are not about growing up in the 50s or australia (i.e. the other 9 books in your catalogue that are not dictionaries or illustrated books). i'm a fast reader though so get to it!