The Lost Continent, by Bill Bryson

In which Bryson travels through small-town America. Not as good as In a Sunburned Nation, because Bryson is often too cursory in his visits, and grouchy, and he goes to the gational parks on days when they are veiled in fog. But still enjoyable, because Bryson is still by and large such a wonderful narrator. To wit:

I drove on to Grand Teton National Park. And there’s another arresting name for you. Tetons means tits in French. That’s an interesting fact—a topographical tit-bit, so to speak—that Miss Mucous, my junior-high geography teacher, failed to share with use in the eighth grade. Why do they always keep the most interesting stuff from you in school? If I’d known in high school that Thomas Jefferson kept a black slave to help him deal with sexual tension or that Ulysses S. Grant was a hopless drunk who couldn’t button his own fly without falling over, I would have had a livelier interest in my lessons, I can assure you.

At any rate, the first French explorers who passed through Northwestern Wyomning took one look at the mountains and said “Zut alors! Hey Jacques, clock those mountains. They look just like my wife’s tetons.” Isn’t it typical of the French to reduce everything to a level of sexual vulgarity? Thank goodness they didn’t discover the Grand Canyon, that’s all I can say. And the remarkable thing is that the Tetons look about as much like tits as….well, as a frying pan or a pair of hiking boots. In a word, they don’t look like tits at all, except perhaps to despreately lonely men who have been away from home for a very long time. They looked a little like tits to me.