10 Second Sermons

This book by comedian Milton Jones is a collection of (as the title implies) very short reflections on various dimensions of Christian life and faith. Most are at least chuckle-worthy and more than a few are laugh-out-loud funny; despite being so entertaining it is also quite consistently thought-provoking, offering sharp sideways insight into Christianity that can be quite disarming. I'd heartily recommend this book as a gift to a Christian friend who you know likes to laugh and think at the same time.

the Hypnotiser

This book is a collection of very amusing poetry by the inimitable Michael Rosen (and illustrated by Andrew Tiffen, whose style is charmingly reminiscent of Quentin Blake).

   It belongs to my dad so I've taken the opportunity to binge-reread it while I'm staying with my family over the holidays - it's the first time I've reread it in well over a decade but I must have read this book twenty times growing up.* The poems are all free verse and incredibly readable, making this a great book for children who are just starting to explore poetry. Their content varies from short absurd skits to reflections on a theme or object (the two-parter about tomatoes I really identify with), to longer more anecdotal pieces (alongside the one about Richard at school who could hypnotise people, hence the title of the book, probably my favourite of these ones is the story about his brother taking him to London Airport on his birthday when he needed a wee) that draw on Rosen's experiences of both childhood and parenthood. His brother Brian and his step-daughter Laura both emerge from this collection as distinct, consistent and entertaining characters in their own right.

   Although I think it's out of print these days this is still a brilliant collection of comedic children's poetry and if you find a copy in a charity shop or on eBay ever you should absolutely snaffle it up - read it yourself first and then give it to a kid who will almost certainly get a kick out of it. They'll thank you.

* It's probably a strong contender for the book owned by my family that has been reread the most times. Certainly the state of the physical object will suggest such, as its spine has almost entirely fallen apart and more than half the pages have resultingly come loose. You have to be careful reading it that they don't all slip out all over the place.

Pistache

This book, by Sebastian Faulks, is a brilliantly inventive and meta-Faustian anthology of spoofed imitation samples writing like other writers. A voice-skipping task with Faulks pulls off with great aplomb and good humour - the Dan Brown, T. S. Eliot and Noel Coward ones are particularly funny I thought - but in the sense of remaining spoiler free I won't give away too many of the names in there but they're all at least pretty funny. Worth keeping on the coffee table or it's the kind of book you could read on the Tube or something, pretty broad appeal to bibliophiles and literary-buffs all across the table I'd reckon for this one.

How to Speak Emoji

This book is quite literally the least entertaining book I think I've ever reviewed for this blog. Do with that information what you please. One for the white elephant game bag...

Small Dreams of a Scorpion

This book by Spike Milligan is a fairly dry and cynical compendium of poems, if I'm being brutally brevitous; it's alright if you're worried about my reading budget, as you may well be forgiven for being seeing what this blog may inherently imply, but I borrowed this one from the Stovell house, as with many of the lent or temporarily-available books that have similarly been spewn onto the ethereal textscape... I'm rambling about almost nothing. Like this poetry book, a bit.

D.I.Y. Dentistry

This book by Andy Riley is one of those "flip through it over the course of six or seven poos and then never think of it again" kind of books, for the coffee table in your nearest bathroom, then to be given away after being disinfected thoroughly to someone you vaguely hope might find it funnier than you did. Not a very humorous humour book if you ask me, very samey and barely even pretends to try to double down on its own penchant for the squeamish.

Sloth Life: Don't Hurry, Be Happy

This book by Forrest Greenwood is a damn near perfect coffee-table toilet-shelf micro-book of cute sloth pics and funny text. That is, I believe, all that needs saying about it - at least, it's all I will say, as ironically I'm writing this in a spot of a rush.

Daredevils and Desperadoes

This book, by seemingly esteemedly myth-renderingly prolific children's author Geraldine McCaughrean; is simple enough. If your presumption from the title is that this is but one more expansion from D&D - think again; this is a collection of well-kept buried much-ken but-morely-mistold in recall - twenty tidbits of the true history of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland - though focusing on England, as you would. Spanning a 300 year or so wash of events and change, McCaughrean revels in her ability to dive into the darkest, strangest corners of our own national mythology to bonk or debunk or misun-bodge or something and just tell the story straight in language that wouldn't offend anyone with pleasant sensibilities nor scare the children. Too much.

   I can hardly claim to do justice to the tales regaled here, but I will list them, and in the true saken apprehension likeness of a knight-errant in diligent digitude, will append each story with a Wikipedia link so you can chase down the funny connections yourselves.

1. My running best bet on the Hokey Cokey's Origin as bourgeois burlesque, in 1348.
2. How being a cat-breeder can make you the Mayor of London.
3. The backstory of the first Tyler Durden style Revolt - and how it was quashed.
4. Henry the 5th's morale-boosting all-nighter - which G.R.R. Martin totally ripped off.
5. An inter-village love story involving bells so Niche I can't find a Wikipage for it.
6. Richard the 3rd's child prince prisoners; and/or their disposals.
7. How an anti-English plot to replace the King achieved a new kind of cake.
8. The clan MacLeod Faery Flag, which is probably actually tartan magic.
9. William Tyndale's much-punished quest to translate the Bible into English.
10. Some contextual notes on Anne Boleyn. And her ghost[s].
11. Jack Horner in 1537 saving illuminated monastic deeds and manuscripts from Henry VIII; if it's a true story, some Monastic Scripts were saved but he is remembered only in nursery rhymes. With a pie, for some reason.
12. More sordid context-notes for our best-known least-loved monarch's spouse[s].
13. How it's likely, or at least speculatively possible, that the wife of Elizabeth the 1st's stablesman killed herself for Queen & Country.
14. Using your velvet cloak as a carpet for a Queen when she would otherwise have to tread in mud is a great way of getting off to a Toady Start.
15. El Draco could of course defeat the Spanish Armada - but finished his game of bowls first. Just cos he's the kind of man who would, and purportedly did.
16. A cousin, losing her head to another. Heavy is the crown, indeed.
17. First settlements and whatnot. Raleigh wanted a city, but kept flitting off.
18. Where in 1588 a long-blown-off Spanish vessel was decimated by locals.
19. One of Shakespeare's greatest tricks - the silent business of upping sticks.
20. A bit more contextual insight into the Fall Guy for big Catholic plots - foiled, 1605.

   Anyway, that's it.
   Yes, I already know I live in a crazy country, but I love it here. Each chapter - as well as telling the fuller stories much more satisfyingly than I have here sketch'd, include short afternote detailing exactly how apocryphal most historiographers tend to agree upon.

KEEP THE FLAG FLYING

This book is a very patriotic collection of what makes the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Island so damn special. Which is nothing, really, we're just used to our own weirdness - if deeply, blithely ignorant of ways in which our own prideful hubris has spread to infect World Kultur.

   In any case, I found this book particularly rousing to my sense of English (and Yorkshire) pride; and found myself making a number of annotations in this book in the hope that it may be craftable into an apologetic present for the Conservative friends in my life whom I fear I have alienated somewhat with my own failures to live graciously since 2016 - I can only hope they find it, plus my scribblings, inspiring as I did - and we may come to see a new reimaginable Britain emerge with vim & vigour into the 2020's.
   Small prayers.

"My Book about Me"

This book - if you haven't heard of Roger Hargreaves's maddeningly-long & samey series of children's books by this point then Google help you; is, quite simply put, an absolute masterwork of metacommentary-breaking genre-bending Fourth Wall Throat Grabbage, as Roger - wearing Mr Silly's hat* - writes a very circularly silly book about Mr Silly trying to get his friends to be included in his book, as without them he is nothing.
   A quite delicate and juicy bud-nipper for childhood solipsisms as readers; without which adolescent trains of readership can turn nihilistic corners - or so has been my experience, at least.



* It is formally subtitled, "by Mr Silly".

Husbands: Don't you just love 'em?

This book, that to my shame, I have been unable to find a link for purchasing or viewing anywhere on the whole internet - but it's from an Oxfordian Past Times Trading Corp, so it'll probably be reprinted or whatever when the Time Traveller's Wife shows up. Publishing joke, sorry.

   Anyway - it's a veritable treasure trove of old wives' wisdoms regarding their partners, warty, gentle or not and all; and rather than react to the book in any Christological depth as I have done this essentially here and here already - I'm just going to drop a few choice para-edited quotes from it. Pretty even split on gender for source quotation'd figures.

• Marriage is like paying an endless visit in your worst cloths; but is popular by its very combination with the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
• All women become like their mothers; that is their tragedy. No man does; that is his.
• Before marriage, a man will lie awake thinking all night about something you said; after marriage he will fall asleep before you have finished saying it.
• The road to success is paved with women pushing their husbands along. (although if we're taking the backseat driver metaphor - they give the co-passengers a bad name if it ever gets above first gear.)
• It's a funny thing that when a person hasn't got anything on Earth to worry about, they tend to go off and get married. It's the woman's job to do this ASAP - the man as late as possible.
• "Beware men wearing flowers" - as a bachelor never quite gets over the idea that he is a thing of beauty and a boy forever.
• Being a spouse is a full-time job. That is why so many husbands fail; they cannot, or do not give their full attention to it.
• "Having someone wonder where you are when you don't come home at night is a very human need." On these grounds, every woman should marry an archaeologist - since she'll grow increasingly attractive to him as she grows increasingly to resemble a ruin.
• "Married life's charm is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties" - and while open marriages are rare, Zsa Zsa Gabor knew a few that were "quite ajar".
• "Bigamy and monogamy are the same - having one husband too many." Oscar Wilde; going on to claim that "divorces are made in heaven."
• Marlene Dietrich says, "once a woman has forgiven her man, she must not reheat his sins for breakfast." Helen Rowland cites this meal and its microcosmic fallout as the Patriarchal Savagery Litmus Test.
• A Mexican proverb: "it is the only war where one sleeps with the enemy." *
• "Even quarrels with one's husband are preferable to ennuis of solitary existence."
• "FATHERS SHOULD BE NEITHER SEEN NOR HEARD. That is the only proper basis for family life." - also O. Wilde. Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men. The purported success of a successful marriage compared to a mediocre one is that three or four things each day are left unsaid.
• Did you know that DIY stands for Do Yourself In?
• Victoria Wood: "He thinks I can't do anything. When he was in ceiling tiles, he used to look up to me, but now he's in contract carpeting he looks at me like I'm underlay."
• Stirling Moss: two things no man will admit to be bad at - driving & fucking.
• After a short discourse on technological interference in marital domestic economy, the next eye-catching quote was the great secret of all successful marriages; "treat all disasters as incidents, and none of the incidents as disasters."
• "Why does a woman work ten years to change a man's habits, the complain he's not the man she married?"
• Men are working to be as mediocre as possible, which is what women want. Dickens makes a reference here to uniforms, but I think algorithms have taken that place in the centuries since that quote flew out straight and true.
• "Suffer the little children to come to me" - Jesus of Nazareth.
• Mrs Patrick Campbell claims that God withheld the sense of humour from women, so that men may love them rather than laugh at them.
• Sydney Smith's quote I will not replicate as it smells too much like Tim Burton.
• Ruth Stafford Peale: "a man's job, basically, is to tame this world; a wife's job is to control herself - and thus indirectly her husband." As it was said by Ian Dury, "the natural thing [we blokes]'ve been born to do is grab someone and go wallop!"
• "Any hope of applying logic or common sense can be blown away with the Cupid arrows of a pretty face and a flattered male ego."
• Mary Lamb: "I have known many single men I should have liked in my life (if it had suited them)... but very few husbands have I ever wished were mine."
• "NO MAN IS RESPONSIBLE FOR HIS FATHER.
• THAT IS ENTIRELY HIS MOTHER'S AFFAIR." - Margaret Turnbull
• "Kissing dun't last - cookery do!" and "when a man discovers a brand of beer exactly to his taste, he should at once throw up his job and go to work in the brewery."
• 3 kinds of kisses;
• fire extinguisher
• mummy
• vacuum cleaner
• Emma Bombeck, on noting the male post-marital appetite; stated "I am not a glutton; I am an explorer of food."
• If you hear BAD music, it's your job to drown it in conversation. And it's probably no mere chance that in legal textbooks the problems relating to married women are usually considered immediately after the pages devoted to idiots and lunatics.
• All unhappy marriages come from husbands having brains.
• "Always suspect any job men willingly vacate for women." - Jill Tweedie
• Liz Taylor - "a diamond in the only kind of ice that keeps a girl warm."
• Bachelors being those who enjoy the chase but don't eat the game; a man & woman may eventually marry because they do not know what else to do with themselves.
• "Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder." - T. Wilder - also, Herbert Spenser calling it "a ceremony in which rings are put on the finger of the lady and through the nose of the gentleman."
• Leo J. Burke; "he who dun't tell his wife everything, probly reckons what she doesn't know won't hurt him."

I really enjoyed this - a great gift-book as a coffee table or bathroom shelf go-to LOLzer.

* Although, given the massive prevalence of civilian locals' being raped en masse by any invading armed forces - this one needs tweaking, Kurdishly - get on it, Spanish speakers.

All Cats Have Asperger Syndrome

This book by Kathy Hoopman is an entertaining, if thoroughly dishonest at surface level, exploration of the similarities between cat behaviours and common personality traits of persons with the higher-functioning autistic spectrum disorder often called Asperger's - not super educational on either front for most practical purposes but an interesting and somewhat amusing conceptual mishmash.

100% unofficial Jeremy Corbyn annual 2019

This book was a Christmas present last year from my youngest brother. I don't think he's read it. As its title suggests, this is a kids-style hardback annual book chock-full of puzzles and trivia and exactly the kind of funny, weird graphics you wouldn't expect your eight-year-olds to be getting Marxist-propaganda'd by the Ultimate Boy from. Of course, I am also writing this after the December of the year which the annual was for and so it comes with an added, six-foot-deep skin of painful nostalgic irony. Maybe next time...

Garfield Minus Garfield

This is a book* collecting several strips from this webcomic by Dan Walsh, which is in turn an extremely simple ripoff of Jim Davis's gargantuanly-popular** strip - each strip having been subjected to one single edit: Garfield is removed. The comedic effect of this, leaving Jon Arbuckle's horrendously sad life to speak for itself, is consistently far funnier than the original comics they're edited from, coming close to sublime in many of the strips.

* This is an almost totally superfluous aside but this post is short enough that I may as well add, it's my brother's book as I got him it for Christmas or something years ago, and I was delighted to notice he's not only kept it but promoted it to that greatest rank a book can aspire to - small shelf near toilet. I flipped through the whole thing in a single shitting.

** And Really Not That Funny, if you ask me.

There's a Hair in my Dirt!

This book, written and illustrated by the inimitable The Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson, is another of the old kids' books left at my parents' house that I've binge-read out of pure unfettered nostalgia, and of the three so far thusly describable it is by far the best on a number of levels.*

   It features a family of anthropomorphized earthworms, the child of whom promptly sets off the story by making its eponymous complaint. The father worm responds by telling him a fable about the true nature of nature, in which animals don't always understand what other animals are doing, trying to do, or even for, and the anarchic cycles of ecology roll ever onwards, illustrated through myriad amusing examples with rich visual humour (the main character of this story is a nature-loving maiden called Harriet, whose final attempt to save a mouse from a snake results in her [SPOILER ALERT] getting a virus from the mouse, dying, and rotting, hence the hair in the dirt). The young worm finishes his reception of the tale with an emboldened sense of a worm's place in the world, then finishes his dinner.

   Very very very funny, surprisingly educational, and you can spend longer looking for all the detail-jokes in the drawings than it would take you to read the text. Certainly a book to crack out for kids who say they like nature, but aren't nearly morbid enough in their worldview yet to display that they properly understand its workings.

* Larson being a favourite humourist of the scientific community, this even features a celebratory foreword from esteemed ecologist Edward O. Wilson, which must be a first for a kids' book.

Five Escape Brexit Island

This book by Bruno Vincent is, weirdly enough, the only Famous Five book I've ever read, never having been much of a fan of Enid Blyton - in it, our plucky four whoevers and their dog are trapped in a mysterious detention facility off the coast of Dorset, from which they have to try to escape to get back to the mainland. I do appreciate the satirical point of all this but to be honest I just found it incredibly depressingly close to reality. Would perhaps recommend as a Christmas present for your gammoniest relatives.

Yorkshire Wisdom

This book, edited by Joe Moorwood, is a reyt good compilation of quotes from all manner of folks from God's own county. Ranging from famous'uns like Alan Bennett, Judy Dench, t'Bronte sisters and Jarvis Cocker* - and also, for sake of maintaining locally-apt respect for t'common people, a selection of particularly wise-sounding, witty or just damn well-n-truly Yorkshire quotations, apothegms, axioms, one-liners, etcetera from folks you'll've never've heard of but I'll tell thee now they know what life's about. Great depth & breadth of variety in themes, content, whatnot - this'd make a grand present for pretty much anyone as you don't have to be from the best place Earth's got on offer to keep a smallish almanac of wisdom from there as a toilet book or summat.

* Who for my bargaining has the best range & writ of wurbage in here, though I'm probly biased.

The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump

This book by Rob Sears is an absolute gem. Extracts from those endlessly articulate, baffling and mental-gymnastical goldmines of the mind of its 'author', be these speeches, tweets, or just things he's said on TV or in interviews or whatever - are lovingly chopped up and reconstituted into really quite tremendous poetic formats. The net result is fucken hilarious - made moreso by the diligent referencing of each quote-snippet so we can fact-check each and every word, phrase & ramble just in case one wanted to make sure Sears wasn't crafting all these himself and we, the readers, could truly trust that what we read here are indeed very much the words of the man himself - and while he maybe didn't put those particular bits of words into those particular orders, the resultant poems are deeply and beautifully emulative of Trump's truest and biggest public persona, with all its nuance & complexity, all its humbly-acknowledged flaws & profound reflective wisdom. Seriously - a book worth engrossment for any who perhaps have not seen the quieter meditative side to our current Excellent President, as this book will enlighten as much as entertain.

We Go to the Gallery

This book, from the Dung Beetle reading scheme,* perfectly encapsulates the roaring depths of alienation, ennui, spiralling existential dread and general sociocultural anxiety with which one's consciousness, upon introduction to their subjective-conceptual limits of artistic and philosophical meaning, becomes afloat with a taste of the transcendent, develops metaphysical and aesthetic and spiritual curiousity, only to be caught up in the westerly winds of modernist and postmodernist and all-the-other-too-manyisms-in-between airs of creative thinking blown across history and so left stranded in the vast stormclouds of the absurd which roll across our contemporary global attention span, shrinking as it is.

In it, Susan and John go to an art gallery with their Mummy, who explains the art to them.

* In the way that those Ladybird spoofs took off, this is the next level of spoof: the Dung Beetle learning books are "designed to make scary subjects approachable for the under 5s. Printed in bold colours and written in clear, simple English, each book will drag families into the dark recesses of the collective unconscious, for their broader cultural benefit," as their incover-page-blurbage attests, and even if this book is the only one they have thus far published it certainly more-or-less achieves this stoic promise. I can only apologise for the lack of accessibility employed in the verbiage of this post, it being a purely accidental side-product of my efforts to write quickly and concisely (which I then undo whatever relative efficiency that that may have allowed by farting off down pointless corners of discourse like this, but nevertheless -) but basically I think this book is as clever and funny as it is bleak and ridiculous, and could make a great present for the right person. Bearing in mind it is really not a children's book in the classical content sense.

Tim the Tiny Horse at Large

This book, by none other than esteemed comedian Harry Hill, isn't that funny or good. I'm literally at a loose end trying to work out who it's for. It's not accessible enough to be a kids' book, it's not subversive or compelling enough to be a jokey adults' book, and it's not edgy enough in either direction to be some kind of Young Adult genre-blender... here Hill seems to have told a story that is, while vaguely entertaining in general, has very little of substance to offer any particular audience, and I'm struggling to think of any means by which it genuinely endeared itself to me - I mean, I did laugh, or at least chuckle, once or twice,* but more out of the total non-sequitur of its whole devising** than purebred wit or characterful comedy. Ah well.


* For my money the best bit in the whole book is the chorus of the lullaby Tim sings to a maggot he's babysitting: "Oh where are your parents? / They can't be that much longer! / It's doing my head in / I'm never having children / If it's like this"

** Tim is a horse roughly the size of a bee, or perhaps a small mint. His best friend is a fly, called Fly, and he later acquires a pet greenfly called George.