Who do you think is the intended audience? Why?

I think that Bill Bryson never writes for a specific group of people. I think that he knows he is funny and just wants to get as many people to read his work as possible. I mean this in the nicest way possible: I think he just likes attention. He doesn't care who reads his books as long as a large number of people read them. In this specific book, however, and actually when I think about in probably most of his books, he writes for the Baby Boomer generation. Bryson is a baby boomer, and he makes baby boomer jokes and allusions. This doesn't contradict what I said earlier: he directs some of his jokes and references to baby boomers, but they are never such that other readers won't get them. He wants everyone to enjoy his books.

The reason that I think his main audience in this book is the Baby Boomer generation is that his topic is one that many baby boomers will relate to. When he was a young adult, he backpacked through Europe, just like lots of others in his generation. Now he's writing about repeating that trip but this time as an older man. The places and experiences are probably things that other people around his age would appreciate. In addition, he tells the entire book from his perspective, obviously. He is a baby boomer. It would make sense that he wrote this book for others his age. Other baby boomers would be able to relate to his reactions to experiences, to his emotions, and to his wishes and desires on his trip, more so than young people or much older people.

Does the author seem to have a friendly, unfriendly or some other type of relationship with the content of the book? Why do you think so??

I finished The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger and am now reading Neither Here Nor There by Bill Bryson. In response to your last comment, yes, I did enjoy The Time Traveler's Wife. I don't, however, think I enjoyed it as much as everyone else I've talked to. I think maybe it got too hyped up before I read it and I expected too much. It still was really very good, though.

Bill Bryson's Neither Here Nor There is an account of Bryson's travels through Europe. He saw Europe when he was twenty years old, and this is his account of his return trip as an older man. As always, Bill Bryson is funny. On his relationship with the content, it completely depends on the circumstances. For example, as he is walking along the canals of Amsterdam in the early hours of the morning, his relationship with the content is very serene and satisfied. However, when he is discussing the rudeness of people in a town I don't remember the name of, his relationship with the content is less friendly and more annoyed and frustrated. He conveys his annoyances not with the perfect words, but more with the perfect absence of words. I think he has mastered the art of omitting. When he talks about a funny situation, he never talks about what made it funny, or why he thinks it is funny, he just gives the reader the information and delivers it in a way in which you have to laugh at it. For example:

"...my seatmate turned out to be an acned string bean with Buddy Holly glasses and a lineup of ballpoint pens clipped into a protective plastic case in his shirt pocket....He spent most of the flight reading Holy Scripture, moving both sets of fingertips across each line of text as he read and voicing the words just loud enough for me to hear them as a fervent whisper in my right ear. I feared the worst....Somewhere over the Atlantic, as I was sitting taking stock of my two hundred cubic centimeters of personal space, as one does on a long plane flight, I spied a coin under the seat in front of me, and with protracted difficulty leaned forward and snagged it. When I sat up, I saw my seatmate was at last looking at me with that ominous glow.

'Have you found Jesus?' he asked suddenly.

'Uh, no, it's a quarter," I answered and quickly settled down and pretended for the next six hours to be asleep, ignoring his whispered entreaties to let Christ build a bunkhouse in my heart."

This is funny only because Bill Bryson never tells us that it is funny. He only provides us with the background information. He doesn't even tell us what he thought about the situation, so we have to draw our own (though obvious) conclusions about his relationship with the content. It's like with stand-up comedians, their jokes are usually only funny as long as they don't laugh too.

Reading Group Guide questions from the back of the book #

Would you call The Time Traveler's Wife a comedy or a tragedy, or are such classifications relevant to a work that plays havoc with time and allows one character to appear periodically after his death?

I looked up the exact definition of comedy to make sure I could commit to an answer to this question, and of the ones I found, most said that in a comedy everything thing ends up well for the protagonist, even if it doesn't end up well for every character. Things in The Time Traveler's Wife don't end happily for the protagonists, Clare and Henry. Henry dies, and Clare is therefore sad for the rest of her life. Even though Henry visits her once after his death when Clare is an old woman, that can't change the fact that they have been apart since he was forty three. Alba's life turns out okay, I suppose, she time-travels but she has more control over her condition. She grows up without a father, however, so of courses she isn't in the best place. Based on these thoughts, I decided that The Time Traveler's Wife can't be a comedy. I looked up the definition of tragedy, and it is:

a dramatic composition, often in verse, dealing with a serious or somber theme, typically that of a great person destined through a flaw of character or conflict with some overpowering force, as fate or society, to downfall or destruction.

The book itself isn't exactly "serious or somber", but it does in fact deal with "serious and somber" themes of loss. Henry would probably be described by some as being "a great person." I would definitely call Henry's time-traveling ability "a flaw of character or conflict with some overpowering force, as fate" and this did lead to his downfall. Therefore, The Time Traveler's Wife is a tragedy.