I spent quite a lot of time reading it, because I left it around the middle to read something else, that something else transformed into 4 books of something else, and one thing led to another, and, and, and.

Maybe this should be called "A short prehistory of nearly everything", because it goes from the Big Bang to the history of humans up to Homo Sapiens, essentially.
My take away message from that book was that the world is fucking weird. And incredibly fascinating.
Bryson discusses all of his subjects (the universe, the planet, water, life, etc.) in a conversational, often giggle-inducing style; I had the feeling that the whole thing may not be very scientifically/historically accurate at times, but overall I think it's a very nice pop science book (in the good sense of the term). I stopped reading a few times thinking "no way, he's trolling me, he's inventing stuff" - but apparently... no. Not in the things that sounded completely incredible to me anyway.
What I really loved about that book is that it's not only a story of what happened, but also a story of the scientific process that allowed us to conceive things as they are. I was pretty shocked to see that a number of things that I have learnt in school as established facts are often way less clear-cut that I've been told (or that I remember having been told, but... I'll never know), and that most of this was actually fairly, if not very recent. Again, I'm not sure if this is something that we weren't told in school, or if it's something that I didn't remember (possibly because 1950-60 seemed probably more distant to 10-year-old me than to 30-old-me, paradoxically), but I found this fascinating - almost as fascinating as the extent of my scientific history inculture :P (And I'd consider myself a science person.)
Anyway, I enjoyed that book a lot. It dragged a bit at some points, but maybe I was just getting tired ;) but all in all, a great book, highly recommended.