Pre-holiday read: In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson

I have a trip coming up to Australia. As luck would have it, just a few days ago, I came across In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson in a Ryan Holiday newsletter. This was Holiday’s pitch: You can’t write about travel books without mentioning Bill Bryson. Bill Bryson’s In A Sunburned Country is not only one of the greatest travel books ever written, but it’s also the funniest. And I just love Australia so much. […] Bryson captures the vastness of Australia, the absurdity of it, the beauty of it…and of course, what the distance of it–how far it is from the rest of the West–and what that perspective gives you. My favorite passage in this book (which was particularly beneficial being there in the runup to the 2024 election) is worth reading in its entirety. “It always amazes me how seldom visitors bother with local paper,” he writes, “I personally can think of nothing more exciting, certainly nothing you could do in a public place with a cup of coffee than to read newspapers from a part…