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.