[I'll get back to wrapping up my "No Crying In Baseball" series next week, but for a bit, I want to start a new series -- books I fantasize about writing someday. I'll probably come back to this intermittently. It's a blog series I've always wanted to write. –Fenzel]

So, my boy Bill Bryson wrote a new book about some old subject matter: Shakespeare: The World As Stage, part of the Harper Collins Eminent Lives series. Harper Collins describes the series as “Brief biographies by distinguished authors on canonical figures.” I recommend the series for pleasure reading (it’s a soft recommendation), but that’s not what this post is about.

I like Bill Bryson a ton — mostly for his writing style guide: Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words: A Writer’s Guide to Getting It Right, which is the most fun you will ever have reading an index of words that isn’t by Ambrose Bierce. He’s got a witty, comfortable, conversational style, and he doesn’t bullshit you. That, of course, makes it difficult for him to write a biography of Shakespeare, because, as Bryson goes into very early in the book, most biographies of Shakespeare are bullshit.