Skip to main content

List love: A funny dozen

I present you with a dozen funny novels I have enjoyed through the years. Indeed, some of them are on my perennial re-reading list, e.g. nos. 2, 6, 7 and 10.

Some will have you laughing out loud while others might have you bubbling with barely suppressed laughter through the read. Not all of them may appeal to all of you, as they range from dark satire to  airy parody to pure slapstick, but there is something in there for almost everyone. In no particular order:
  • Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Satire. About the absurdities of army life and war.
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. All of the books in the series, but especially the first one. Very good science-fantasy and a parody of the genre, and also very funny.
  • Three Men in a Boat, to say nothing of the Dog by Jerome K. Jerome. A funny collection of the travel misadventurs of three men and a dog on a boating holiday in the Thames.
  • Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis. The adventures of the unflappable Auntie Mame as seen through the eyes of her nephew.
  • Rumpole of the Bailey by John Mortimer. A Short stories about a canny old lawyer. If you can find a more humorously cynical old codger than Rumploe, please let me know.
  • Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett. Actually, all of Pratchett’s books are funny to some degree, although the humour has become darker as the Discworld series progresses. I decided to pick this one. Because. No, just Because. Oh, all right, I if you must know, it was all the movie references and twists. And the talking dog. And the …. Look it’s a funny book, all right?
  • Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons. Parody at its best. Gibbons took every cliché from the rural novels so popular at the time and molded them into a classic humorous novel.
  • The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ by Sue Townsend. Teenage angst has never seemed so funny.
  • Bellwether by Connie Willis. Two scientists investigating trends collide with the assistant from Hell and comedy ensues.
  • My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell. His descriptions of people and animals sparkle and he had a wonderful eye for the absurd.
  • The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin. The chase scene is classic comedy gold that I would love to see on the big screen.
  • Appleby’s End by Michael Innes. Innes wrote wonderfully quirky detective stories but this one is probably the strangest of them all, and quite funny in a rather surrealist way.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down
Post a Comment
Read more

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove
Post a Comment
Read more

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout  woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went and
Post a Comment
Read more