The Secret History of Your House

After many years as renters, my husband and I recently decided that we’re finally ready to buy our first place, and I have houses on the brain. Now that a mind-boggling number of variables suddenly demand consideration (do we really need a separate dining room?), I find myself wondering—what makes a structure a home?

This is a highly subjective question with a different answer for every person, especially since the meaning of “home” has changed quite a bit over time. The social and cultural histories of home life give a fascinating glimpse into our own past through the evolution of domestic comforts. In At Home: A Short History of Private Life, Bill Bryson uses his own dwelling, a creaky old Victorian parsonage, as a lens to examine these hidden histories as they happened in Britain and the United States.

As the author points out, “the history of household life isn’t just a history of beds and sofas and kitchen stoves, as I had vaguely supposed it would be, but of scurvy and guano and the Eiffel Tower and bedbugs and body-snatching and just about everything that has ever happened”. Real history is in the details, in the things we touch and eat and keep in our closets, and Bryson leads the reader on a hilarious and revealing room-by-room ride through those details.

If you like smart, funny nonfiction that explains the mysteries of the mundane in a refreshing way, or if you like the idea of rummaging through the bathroom cabinets of history, I think you will enjoy this book as much as I did.

Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson

OK, this title didn't send me scurrying to the shelves, but when I saw that Shakespeare: The World as Stage was written by the incomparable Bill Bryson I was delighted with my find. I love the way Bryson serves up information that's good for you and presents it with so much great storytelling, wry observation and outright wit that its impossible not to get smarter just reading him--sometimes in spite of yourself.

Shakespeare the man is a challenging subject. There's not much known about the Bard, who departed this good life in 1616 without leaving posterity much of a personal record. As Bryson points out, there are only a handful of days in Shakespeare's entire life about which we can say "...with absolutely certainty where he was." So, four hundred years later, to know Shakespeare the man one must understand the world in which he lived.

Bryson is a jolly tour guide to this world, clearly at home in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. He happily walks us through these calamitous times and covers all manner of diverse topics along the way, from economics (a well-paid headmaster earned 20 pounds annually) to societal norms (40 percent of brides were pregnant on their wedding day), and from jurisprudence (you could be fined for letting your ducks wander in the road) to diet (folks liked their food sweet, so black teeth, rotted from sugar, were commonplace. Poor people blackened their teeth so as to look more prosperous). There's fascinating stuff to learn about the theater, too (the Puritans believed theaters were "hotbeds of sodomy [and] wanton liaisons," and blamed them for all sorts of social ills and even a few natural calamities, like the earthquake of 1580).