LONDON — Did you see the Facebook list of 100 observations about Britain from an American tourist that went viral earlier this week?

Big deal. Bill Bryson has been doing that for decades, and his observations are about a thousand times funnier.

Bryson, an American writer and traveler extraordinaire, published "Notes from a Small Island" — covering what was supposed to be a farewell trip around the UK before he went back to the U.S. — in 1995. Because Brits love anyone who expresses both affection and bafflement about their fair isle, "Notes" became his first bestseller. In 2003, they voted it the book that best represents England. Bryson moved back to the country that same year.

For the 20th anniversary of the book, Bryson has written a follow-up adventure called "The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island." It's also his first travel book in 15 years. Released on what is known as Super Thursday, the biggest day in the British publishing calendar, it managed to outshine a whole raft of celebrity memoirs, potboilers and books by YouTube stars. (Americans will have to wait a little longer; the book won't be released in the U.S. until January.)

Rather than revisit the more popular tourist destinations seen in "Notes" — such as Oxford and Durham, where the prestigious university made him honorary Chancellor in 2005 — Bryson decided to follow a line from Bognor Regis on the south coast to Cape Wrath in the north of Scotland. Ostensibly this is because he was irritated by the common claim, seen on the British citizenship test he took, that Land's End to John O'Groats is the longest line you can travel on the island, and wanted to prove that was wrong. But Bryson being Bryson, you get the sense that he really just liked the names:

I particularly liked the idea of Cape Wrath. I know nothing about it — it could be a caravan park, for all I know — but it sounded rugged and wave-battered and difficult to get to, a destination for a serious traveler. When people asked me where I was bound, I could gaze towards the northern horizon with a set expression and say: 'Cape Wrath, God willing.' I imagined my listeners giving a low whistle of admiration and replying 'Gosh, that's a long way.' I would nod in grim acknowledgment. 'Not even sure if there's a tearoom,' I would add.

Much has been made of Bryson's ability to make you laugh out loud on public transit, and I can confirm "Little Dribbling" even has this effect on an interminably overcrowded, overdelayed Tube train. Partly this is because Bryson finds rich seams of humor in the most mundane moments of modern British life — such as being stuck on public transit.

He gets a good half-chapter out of a bus from Bognor to Brighton, just by pointing out the contrast between its name (the Coastliner 700) and its less glamorous reality. He finds a pile of gossip magazines in the seat pocket, claiming they're called Hello! OK! Now! What Now! Not Now! and Shut the Fuck Up!, and soon enough we're guffawing along with him at the inane contents.

In less expert hands, this could be the most dull travelogue ever: I got on a bus and read some magazines! But Bryson is a wizard with words, and he hits just the right note of comic exaggeration every time. A Caesar salad ordered in a Dover hotel arrives as "a kind of lettuce soup with some shredded chicken afloat on it." A bus station is "just an outer wall of Sainsbury's with a glass marquee over it, evidently to give pigeons a dry place to shit." An officious National Trust volunteer has "the tone of a man who would stab his wife in the eye with an ice pick if head office told him it was policy."

But it isn't all laughable inanity.

The truly great thing about Bryson is that he really cares and is insanely curious — about cities, nature, history, aesthetics, and mind-blowing things in general. He is absolutely head-over-heels in love with Britain, bad food and pigeon shit notwithstanding, and declares it "the perfect size for a country — small enough to be cosy and embraceable, but large enough to maintain a lively and independent culture."

His chapter on London alone almost made me want to move back here permanently. (Almost.)

Every page contains the kind of jaw-dropping fact that will have you nudging your partner in the ribs and pointing to a paragraph. Did you know that Eisenhower, when he was the supreme Allied commander in World War II, lived alone in a cottage on Wimbledon Common with nothing but a single guard for protection? That there's an oak on Hampstead Heath from which nothing is legally allowed to block your view of St. Paul's Cathedral? Or that the British once wanted to build a town called Motopia with a lattice of elevated roads running over the rooftops and nothing but leafy lanes between the houses?

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Not for nothing is Bryson regularly called up on by campaigns to save the countryside, remove litter or help preserve some historical site or other (like that stone circle above). He is brought to apoplectic levels of fury by stupid decisions that squander Britain's natural beauty — a multi-story car park next to prime seafront, serene rolling hills rudely interrupted by a concrete tower block.

But unlike more serious-minded authors who might leave you feeling somehow guilty about environmental travesties, Bryson turns his anger into a comedy bit. He loves to imagine what was going on in the head of the idiot who commissioned such things. Reading his work is like going on holiday with the members of Monty Python — or rather, if Python member Michael Palin had written his travel books in as madcap a style as his sketches.

If Bryson ever decided to pimp himself out as a traveling companion for UK visitors at a thousand-pound-a-day rate, I'm sure he'd have takers. You would end the day with a busted gut, a head full of knowledge and tremendous newfound appreciation for everything history and the natural world have to offer.

Until then, traveling inside his head, inside his books, will have to suffice. Let's hope it isn't another two decades before he takes us for a spin around his adopted homeland again.