Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour by Kate FoxMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Amazon Book Description
A runaway bestseller in the UK, Watching the English is now available in the U.S. for the first time! Witty and wise, Kate Fox reveals the quirks, habits, and foibles of the English in her book Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour. Putting the national character under her microscope, Fox explores this strange and fascinating culture, governed by a complex set of unspoken rules and a bizarre code of conduct. Through anthropological analysis and a series of unorthodox experiments (often using herself as a reluctant guinea-pig), Fox discovers what these unwritten codes tell us about Englishness: the rules of weather-speak, the ironic-gnome rule, the reflex apology rule, the paranoid-pantomime rule, class anxiety tests, and the money-talk taboo, among others. Watching the English is a biting, affectionate, insightful, and often hilarious look at English society.
I never thought an anthropology book could be so humorous. Kate Fox provides her insights into what it means to be English and why, anthropologically speaking, the English behave the way they do, generally speaking. The book is broken down into different aspects of life and then the author shares the results of her studies. One of my favorite studies that she did was on the subject of queue jumping. In her study, she forced herself to be a queue jumper in order to see if her foundational beliefs were correct as to how the British respond to such an impolite act. Kate, being English herself, said it was one of the hardest things she has ever had to do. It went against every fiber of her being to have to jump the queue but had to do so for the sake of her research. What she found was that the queue jumper was never confronted by the people in the queue. Consistently she found that those in the queue would whisper to each other, roll their eyes, etc., but never confront the person who actually jumped the queue.
Additional area I found to be of interest was on the subject of the English pub and the unwritten rules of the pub, the common conversation starter being the topic of the weather, the unwritten rules of apologizing, and the art of British humor. The anecdotes that accompanied her observations and summaries were extremely entertaining. What I'm not sure of is if I found these stories so amusing because I'm not English and found myself wondering if the average English person reading this book would be as captivated and would find themselves shaking their head and saying, "Yep, I do that!" I really need to find an anthropology book that takes a similar humorous look at the rules of being American and see if I can relate. Overall a great read and was set to give the book a solid 4 stars but the last several chapters seemed to be a bit redundant of topics covered earlier in the book. I still really enjoyed the read. It is over 400 pages but doesn't read like a textbook, however the print is extremely small and that made for more difficult reading.
I am interested to read
also by Kate Fox. There were several references to Bill Bryson and his book
and will be adding these to my to be read list.
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