#doom hypno and buster designs are here

[artbywaffless]

a grave digger a combat specialist and psychic walk into a bar

[maneatsbooks]

TOP 10 EASY-READING TO HELP YOU THROUGH THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Covid-19 has been a grim daily grind through statistics and curves (flattened or not) and light relief has been scant. Even television seems grittier nowadays.

So, my reading list needs one or two little light aperitifs to lift the mood – books so slight and effervescent they linger only as long as their tipsy mood lightens your heart – a panacea for the dearth of mirth these days.  Here’s my Top 10:

1: THE DUD AVOCADO by Elaine Dundy

Sally Jay Gorce is a woman with a mission. It’s the 1950’s, she’s young, and she’s in Paris. Having dyed her hair pink and vowed to go native in a way not even the natives can manage, she’s busy getting drunk, bedding men, losing jewellery and living life to the full.

‘Here was all the gaiety and glory and sparkle I knew was going to be life if I could just grasp it.’

A wonderful cocktail of a book, as light and airy as a champagne bubble.

2: RIGHT HO, JEEVES by PG Wodehouse

If the world is not quite the shade of peachy keen you would like and you’re feeling a bit ooja-cum-spiff, manservant Jeeves has the perfect pick me up to restore your mettle. You could start with almost any Jeeves and Wooster novel, but this one contains some of the juiciest Woosterisms:

‘I don’t want to wrong anybody, so I won’t go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature to excite the liveliest of suspicions.’

3: LEONARD AND HUNGRY PAUL by Ronan Hession

Like a Buster Keaton version of Waiting for Godot, this wonderful novel in which practically nothing happens has been one of my favourite reads of 2020. Best friends Leonard and Hungry Paul are two zen-like 30-somethings swimming with the indifferent tides of their lives.

Gently humous and genuinely affecting, this book is perfect to help understand the importance of human moments amid the clamour of modernity.

4: COLD COMFORT FARM by Stella Gibbons

Young, modern Flora Poste is sent to live with her remote country cousins, the Stakadders, in remote Sussex – Judith, her preacher husband Amos, their sons Seth and Reuben, several cousins and the redoubtable Aunt Ada Doom.

Miss Poste imposes her life-affirming no-nonsense ‘higher common sense’ in an attempt to redeem the lives of her relatives to wonderfully humorous effect. Will Flora be able to over come Aunt Doom’s fear of ‘something nasty in the woodshed’?

5: ME TALK PRETTY ONE DAY by David Sedaris

A collection of essays by the inimitable American humourist, David Sedaris, including the title story where he hilariously attempts to learn French.

“On my fifth trip to France I limited myself to the words and phrases that people actually use.

From the dog owners I learned ‘lie down,’ ‘shut up,’ and ‘who shit on this carpet?’

The couple across the road taught me to ask questions correctly, and the grocer taught me to count.

Things began to come together, and I went from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly.

“Is thems the thoughts of cows?” I’d ask the butcher, pointing to the calves’ brains displayed in the windows. “I want some lamb chops with handles on ‘em’.

6: GOOD OMENS by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

How we all miss Sir Terry and his askew view of the universe. Whilst I was never a huge fan of the Discworld novels, this novel is an artform in itself. As co-author Neil Gaiman states, Terry is an early riser, and Neil a night-owl, so this story was written in the few hours each day when they were both awake.

The ultimate nature-versus-nurture story in which the antichrist is born in a perfect English village and an angel and a demon, both of whom have grown very fond of humanity over the last 4,000 years, must team up to stop the apocalypse.

7: I FEEL BAD ABOUT MY NECK by Nora Ephron

Journalist, writer and filmmaker, Nora Ephron had funny bones. Writer of Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, here she turns her gimlet eye on her own aging process with a wicked sense of fun.

“Here are some questions I am constantly noodling over: Do you splurge or do you hoard? Do you live every day as if it’s your last, or do you save your money on the chance you’ll live twenty more years? Is life too short, or is it too long?

Do you work as hard as you can, or do you slow down to smell the roses? And where to carbohydrates fit into all this?

Are we really all going to spend out last years avoiding bread, especially now that bread in America is so unbelievably delicious?

And what about chocolate?”

8: THE MEANING OF LIFF by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd

“In Life,” wrote Douglas Adams, “there are many hundreds of common experiences, feelings, situations and even objects which we all know and recognise, but for which no word exists. On the other hand, the world is littered with thousands of spare works which spend their time doing nothing but loafing about on signposts pointing at places. Our job, as we see it, is to get these words down off the signposts and into the mouths of babes..”

Thusly:

Blithbury n.: A look someone gives you which indicates that they’re much too drunk to have understood anything you’ve said to them in the last twenty minutes.

Ahenny adj.: The way people stand when examining other people’s bookshelves.

Listowel n.: The small mat on the bar designed to be more absorbent than the bar, but not as absorbent as your elbows.

9: DEATH AND THE PENGUIN by Andrei Kurkov

Viktor Zolotaryov is a frustrated writer whose short stories are too short and dull. When a newspaper edito offers him a job as an obituarist, he agrees. His brief is to select high-profile Ukranian people and prepare obituaries in readiness for the possibility they might die. And then the do.

Viktor’s strange new career is watched with melancholic disapproval by his pet penguin, Misha, adopted a few month earlier form the impoverished city zoo.

A sourly absurdist fable, Andrei Kurkov has written a black comedy of post-Soviet chaos where ambulance drivers must be bribed to bring you to hospital (U.S dollars for preference) and everything is for sale – including a child’s heart for penguin heart surgery.

10: ALL MY FRIENDS ARE SUPERHEROES by Andrew Kaufman

All of Tom’s friends are superheroes, and he’s about to be married to one: the Perfectionist. But on the day of their wedding, the Perfectionist’s ex-boyfriend, Hypno, hypnotises her by making her believe that Tom is invisible. Now the Perfectionist, boarding a flight to Vancouver and thining Tom left her, is moving away for good. And Tom has until the plane lands to make her see him again.

Told in flashback and ending Richard Curtis-style at the airport AMFAS is a beautifully quirky story of rediscovery.

[maneatsbooks]

Top 10: Literary Pandemic Vaccines

The pandemic has been a grim daily grind through statistics and curves (flattened or not) and light relief has been scant. Even television seems grittier nowadays.

So, my reading list needs one or two little light aperitifs to lift the mood – books so slight and effervescent linger as long as their tipsy mood lightens your heart – a panacea for the dearth of mirth these days.  Here’s my Top 10:

1: THE DUD AVOCADO by Elaine Dundy

Sally Jay Gorce is a woman with a mission. It’s the 1950’s, she’s young, and she’s in Paris. Having dyed her hair pink and vowed to go native in a way not even the natives can manage, she’s busy getting drunk, bedding men, losing jewellery and living life to the full.

‘Here was all the gaiety and glory and sparkle I knew was going to be life if I could just grasp it.’

A wonderful cocktail of a book, as light and airy as a champagne bubble.

2: RIGHT HO, JEEVES by PG Wodehouse

If the world is not quite the shade of peachy keen you would like and you’re feeling a bit ooja-cum-spiff, manservant Jeeves has the perfect pick me up to restore your mettle. You could start with almost any Jeeves and Wooster novel, but this one contains some of the juiciest Woosterisms:

‘I don’t want to wrong anybody, so I won’t go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature to excite the liveliest of suspicions.’

3: LEONARD AND HUNGRY PAUL by Ronan Hession

Like a Buster Keaton version of Waiting for Godot, this wonderful novel in which practically nothing happens has been one of my favourite reads of 2020. Best friends Leonard and Hungry Paul are two zen-like 30-somethings swimming with the indifferent tides of their lives.

Gently humous and genuinely affecting, this book is perfect to help understand the importance of human moments amid the clamour of modernity.

4: COLD COMFORT FARM by Stella Gibbons

Young, modern Flora Poste is sent to live with her remote country cousins, the Stakadders, in remote Sussex – Judith, her preacher husband Amos, their sons Seth and Reuben, several cousins and the redoubtable Aunt Ada Doom.

Miss Poste imposes her life-affirming no-nonsense ‘higher common sense’ in an attempt to redeem the lives of her relatives to wonderfully humorous effect. Will Flora be able to over come Aunt Doom’s fear of ‘something nasty in the woodshed’?

5: ME TALK PRETTY ONE DAY by David Sedaris

A collection of essays by the inimitable American humourist, David Sedaris, including the title story where he hilariously attempts to learn French.

“On my fifth trip to France I limited myself to the words and phrases that people actually use.

From the dog owners I learned ‘lie down,’ ‘shut up,’ and ‘who shit on this carpet?’

The couple across the road taught me to ask questions correctly, and the grocer taught me to count.

Things began to come together, and I went from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly.

“Is thems the thoughts of cows?” I’d ask the butcher, pointing to the calves’ brains displayed in the windows. “I want some lamb chops with handles on ‘em’.

6: GOOD OMENS by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

How we all miss Sir Terry and his askew view of the universe. Whilst I was never a huge fan of the Discworld novels, this novel is an artform in itself. As co-author Neil Gaiman states, Terry is an early riser, and Neil a night-owl, so this story was written in the few hours each day when they were both awake.

The ultimate nature-versus-nurture story in which the antichrist is born in a perfect English village and an angel and a demon, both of whom have grown very fond of humanity over the last 4,000 years, must team up to stop the apocalypse.

7: I FEEL BAD ABOUT MY NECK by Nora Ephron

Journalist, writer and filmmaker, Nora Ephron had funny bones. Writer of Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, here she turns her gimlet eye on her own aging process with a wicked sense of fun.

“Here are some questions I am constantly noodling over: Do you splurge or do you hoard? Do you live every day as if it’s your last, or do you save your money on the chance you’ll live twenty more years? Is life too short, or is it too long?

Do you work as hard as you can, or do you slow down to smell the roses? And where to carbohydrates fit into all this?

Are we really all going to spend out last years avoiding bread, especially now that bread in America is so unbelievably delicious?

And what about chocolate?”

8: THE MEANING OF LIFF by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd

“In Life,” wrote Douglas Adams, “there are many hundreds of common experiences, feelings, situations and even objects which we all know and recognise, but for which no word exists. On the other hand, the world is littered with thousands of spare works which spend their time doing nothing but loafing about on signposts pointing at places. Our job, as we see it, is to get these words down off the signposts and into the mouths of babes..”

Thusly:

Blithbury n.: A look someone gives you which indicates that they’re much too drunk to have understood anything you’ve said to them in the last twenty minutes.

Ahenny adj.: The way people stand when examining other people’s bookshelves.

Listowel n.: The small mat on the bar designed to be more absorbent than the bar, but not as absorbent as your elbows.

9: DEATH AND THE PENGUIN by Andrei Kurkov

Viktor Zolotaryov is a frustrated writer whose short stories are too short and dull. When a newspaper edito offers him a job as an obituarist, he agrees. His brief is to select high-profile Ukranian people and prepare obituaries in readiness for the possibility they might die. And then the do.

Viktor’s strange new career is watched with melancholic disapproval by his pet penguin, Misha, adopted a few month earlier form the impoverished city zoo.

A sourly absurdist fable, Andrei Kurkov has written a black comedy of post-Soviet chaos where ambulance drivers must be bribed to bring you to hospital (U.S dollars for preference) and everything is for sale – including a child’s heart for penguin heart surgery.

10: ALL MY FRIENDS ARE SUPERHEROES by Andrew Kaufman

All of Tom’s friends are superheroes, and he’s about to be married to one: the Perfectionist. But on the day of their wedding, the Perfectionist’s ex-boyfriend, Hypno, hypnotises her by making her believe that Tom is invisible. Now the Perfectionist, boarding a flight to Vancouver and thining Tom left her, is moving away for good. And Tom has until the plane lands to make her see him again.

Told in flashback and ending Richard Curtis-style at the airport AMFAS is a beautifully quirky story of rediscovery.