The key to Bill Bryson as a writer is that he has developed a fluent and distinctive "voice". This is a very neat trick, since written words are very inert compared to human voices, so it takes an excellent writer to carry this off. It is his greatest strength and it brings his books alive, as embodiments of a good, entertaining companion.

As a storyteller, Bryson works entirely in the shortest form - the anecdote. He would make a wretched novelist and a fairly mediocre short story writer. However, anecdotes are just the right length for the setup and delivery of a punchline.

As an author he is smart enough to realize that you have to break up the funny stuff with more serious passages. He knows how to 'pace' a reader. (His serious intervals often contain factual material that he cribs out of the books of other, more serious authors - whom he always credits by name.)

I happen to like his books a great deal. If I seem overly analytic about how he blows his soap bubbles of entertainment, it is because I am a writer myself and my admiration naturally includes taking his books apart to see how they tick.