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.

In a Sunburned Country, by Bill Bryson, I

Bryson’s hilarious and brilliant book about Australia. Just a piece from early on in which he sells what makes this country/continent so remarkable:
I have a story about a little bug called Nothomyrmecia macrops that I think illustrates perfectly, if a little obliquely, what an exceptional country this is. It’s a slightly involved tale but a good one, so bear with me.

In 1931 on the Cape Arid peninsula in Western Australia, some amateur naturalists were poking about in the scrubby wastes when they found an insect none had ever seen before. It looked vaguely like an ant, but was an unusual pale yellow and had strange, staring, distinctly unsettling eyes. Some specimens were collected and these found their way to the desk of an expert at the National Museum of Victoria in Melbourne, who identified the insect at once as Nothomyrmecia. The discovery caused great excitement because, as far as anyone knew, nothing like it had existed on earth for a hundred million years. Nothomyrmecia was a proto-ant, a living relic from a time when ants were evolving from wasps. In entomological terms, it was extraordinary, as if someone had found a herd of triceratops grazing on some distant grassy plain.

As expedition was organized at once, but despite the most scrupulous searching, no one could find the Cape Arid colony. Subsequent searches came up equally empty-handed. Almost half a century later, when word got out that a team of American scientists was planning to search for the ant, almost certainly with the kind of high-tech gadgetry that would make the Australians look amateurish and underorganized, government scientists decided to make one final, preemptive effort to find the ants alive. So a party of them set out in a convoy across the country.

On the second day out, while driving across the South Australia desert, one of their vehicles began to smoke and sputter, and they were forced to make an unscheduled overnight stop at a lonely pause in the highway called Poochera. During the evening one of the scientists, a man named Bob Taylor, stepped out for a breath of air and idly played his flashlight over the surrounding terrain. You may imagine his astonishment when he discovered, crawling over the trunk of a eucalyptus beside their campsite, a thriving colony of none other than Nothomyrmecia.

Now consider the possibilities. Taylor and his colleagues were eight hundred miles from their intended search site. In the almost 3 million square miles of emptiness that is Australia, one of the handful of people able to identify it had just found one of the rarest, most sought-after insects on earth—an insect seen alive just once, almost half a century earlier—and all because their van had broken down where it did. Nothomyrmecia, incidentally, has still never been found at its original site.

You take my point again, I’m sure. This is a country that is at once staggeringly empty and yet packed with stuff. Interesting stuff, ancient stuff, stuff not readily explained. Stuff yet to be found.

Trust me, this is an interesting place.