Title: A Short History of Nearly Everything 2.0

Author: Bill Bryson

Genre: NonFiction

Book published: and Read: Late Spring of 2026

Don't remember exactly why I wated to read this book, but if I had to guess it's cause I was feeling dumb and wanted to get smarter *sparkle emoji*. Regardless, I wound up finding out about it on Reddit, under someone's post that asked what books they should read to learn more about the world. Read it around finals season, before and after heading back to my hometown for the summer. Got it digitally, but apparently my college library has a physical copy of the 2003 version.

So I really liked this book! I will say it's less about history and more about science, but I was fine with that. It was both informative and very funny, which is my favorite blend of genres. It was also written in a way that I could fully understand, which was awesome, because I think a lot of the time informative texts use big (and scary!) words/sentence structures. Point is, I think it's a lot of good information at a reading level that anyone can comprehend. It also talked about a lot of realy intriguing stuff, due to the fact that- in my and the author's opinion- science is super interesting, it's just that our education cirriculums often fail to mention the interesting bits. For example, it talked about how if Yellowstone volcano were to explode human life on Earth would be likely wiped out, or, at the very least, suffer greatly. It also talked about the year without summer during that chapter, when in 1816 a volcano exploded and the ash it spit out blocked a lot of the sun's rays from reaching the planet. Some other stuff that was discussed included Isacc Newton being kinda insane (he correctly calculated the shape of the Earth, lost the notes with the math for this, and didn't care to do anything about it until a friend of his asked him to like- try and find them. There was other stuff he did but I highkey forgot), Charles Darwin not publishing his research about natural selection for twenty years- until he learned that someone else had figured out the same thing and was on track to publish their work before his, and how Albert Einstein spent the later half of his life attempting to find an equation that connected the world of the macro (you, everything you see around you, and also everything in the universe itself) to the insane world of the micro (atoms and electrons and all that)- something he never actually managed to do.