The Fun Stuff

 

        Everyone needs a light distraction in their reading from time to time. Try these!

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 "GARFIELD (Fat Cat 3 Pack)" - Jim Davis (USA 2022)

        Happiness is having grandkids who know what to give you for Xmas!

        Every now and then you just have to have a break from the serious business of life, and if Roddy Doyle or Spike Milligan aren't readily at hand, go for Garfield! Or Calvin & Hobbes. Or The Peanuts Gang. My three favourite graphic comedy releases. All of which I was given last Xmas, and Garfield is first cat off the rank. 'Library' mornings for the last week or so have been a festival of smiles, snickers, chuckles, laughs, and guffaws, and after that I'll get back to all the less important stuff of life.

        Everyone should have a comedy escape plan!

Here is one of his classic gems...

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  "THE UNLIKELY HEROICS OF SAM HOLLOWAY" - Rhys Thomas (2018 UK)

        This is a great piece of easy-to-read escapism, well written, and structured to make you (eventually) feel good. And oddly enough, just about believable!

        "Three nights a week, Sam dons his superhero costume and patrols the streets. It makes him feel invincible..." is part of the back blurb, and on the strength of that you might be tempted to give it a miss, but don't. I spent the whole book on Sam's side, willing him to find what he's looking for from life. You could call this a love story with a difference.

        Sam - he's about 25 and geeky and of current day Middle England - experienced an horrific trauma while doing uni, now lives on his own, has a couple of mates and a well-paid job and a nice suburban house, but leads a part time secret life which, if you can make the leap - and it isn't all that hard - helps him to deal with life. But then he meets Sarah and his comfortably manufactured world that he hides behind starts to come unravelled.

         And Rhys Thomas (the author, not the others!) has his own web page that's worth a visit.

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"BOX 18 - The Unpublished Spike Milligan" - ed Norma Farnes (UK 2006)

        Some would say that the late great Spike Milligan is an acquired taste. They must have either (a) never read this book, and/or (b) have no funny bone. And yes, his humour is zany, subtle, and at times as manic as he was, flying in from left field or gently exploding in your face. But I've been a fan since I was 12.

        Assembled and edited by his long time manager and friend six years after his death, this collection is his Box 18, one of  a host of numbered box files he kept his creativity and his life and letters and business bits in, variously titled, such as - "Anti Pollution And Organic Food", "Laundry & Dry Cleaning", "Car - Hire Garage Petrol Oil Etc", "Royal Society For The Protection Of Birds" - but this one was just "IDEAS". It was where he dumped all the scraps till he could get to them - poetry, drawings, parts of radio scripts, some funny, some scatty when he was on the high of his bipolar, and some very dark when the black dog had him by the throat.

        Also in this collection is a selection of his correspondence - he was an avid letter writer - variously to the BBC, the Works Officer at Buck Palace, Prince Charles, Paul & Linda McCartney, Paul Getty Jr (who would write to Spike just to get a letter), several people in the Home Office, Michael Parkinson, most of the better daily newspapers, and covering a welter of subjects, from protecting birds to street lighting, and - because he was born in India (but of British parents) - many concerning the revocation of his passport, even though he'd done 5 years war service in the British Army. Geez, did that bring out the indignation and the sarcasm, as he hated bureaucracy, hypocrisy, cruelty, injustice, and stupidity. It caused him to take out Irish citizenship (he was part Irish). He also had a great affection for Australia, visiting often to see his parents, who emigrated there in mid life.

        But if you'd like to dig more into the life and times of this complex and unique individual, his Wiki page is worth a read....

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"THE VAN" - Roddy Doyle (Ire 1991)

        If you found one loose page of a book - no, half a loose page, the right hand half at that - in a gutter in say Toronto - no, say a rubbish tip in Baghdad - you'd recognise it as Roddy Doyle. Straight off. Just the bottom half of the right hand half even. Might not pick which one of his Barrytown series - "The Commitments", "The Snapper", and this one, but you'd know it was one of them. Not just because of his way of doing dialogue, but because the characters jump out at you. The Rabbitte family in full flight. Being the Rabbitte family. Fresh and energetic every time. This one where Jimmy Rabbitte Snr is on the dole and decides to buy a chippie - a fish and chips van. God I do so love this guy's stuff.

        But I must track down one of his serious, non-"Barrytown" novels, I'm starting to experience him too narrowly. And there's about 200 other authors on my Must Read Before I Kick Off list I need to pay a little homage. Ah, so much yet to read. 

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 "ADOLF HITLER : My Part In His Downfall" - Spike Milligan (UK 1971)

        One day I was yearning for something light. Light and brilliant. And ridiculously funny. This is it. Ridiculously funny insofar as finding so much that is ridiculous in human behaviour is as funny as hell. Even World War II. Especially World War II. The opening dedication sets the mood....

"After 'Puckoon' I swore I would never
write another novel. This is it."

        I remember getting hooked on The Goon Show in about 1956, head crammed into the radio and most of the rest of the family shaking theirs, not understanding the unique humour that was Harry Seacombe, Peter Sellers, and Spike Milligan, as they set about their weekly sending up of the world beautifully. Ah, the classic days of steam radio. I have more Spike Milligan books on my shelves than Roddy Doyle, William Golding, or Tim Winton, and I love all of them. What can I say. I also love the ridiculous.

        This one is part one of a self-illustrated trilogy of Spike - which I read for the second time some years back - and his bumpy passage through the war as a gunner in the Artillery, during which he indulged his passion for stupidity, the local ladies, and big band swing. And taking the piss out of everything. Especially officers. He writes...  "Happiness was a mug of tea, a cigarette, and a record of Bunny Berigan playing 'Lets Do It'. What's happened to us all since then? The world's gone sour. Happiness is a yesterday thing."  Here is what Spike was listening to in 1941...

LET'S DO IT

.... while he was training down in Sussex for the real thing, yet to come. Which, if I remember part three, eventually was to traumatise him into a psyche ward for a short spell, as the mayhem around this sensitive soul refused to be joked away any more.

        Spike died in 2002, and was buried in the churchyard of St Thomas The Martyr in Winchelsea down on the English south coast, after which a minor family pantomime played out concerning his headstone, a broohah that he would've found hilarious. We visited him in 2004, and found him like this...


...but several years later went back to see that they finally got their whatsit together and fittingly gave him a celtic cross (he had Irish parents, although was born in India), and in Gaelic the epitath he had always wanted...

"I told you I was ill!"

        This time I won't say do yourself a favour and get a copy and all that, as Spike is an acquired taste, but I dare say I personally will never tire of reading his stuff. And don't forget that next Saturday is his 103rd birthday. Stop a moment and thank your God for letting this particular soul wander among us for a while.

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"ROMMEL? GUNNER WHO" - Spike Milligan (UK 1974)

        Part two of Spike's war "diaries" (see above).

        Him and his artillery unit are in North Africa and as shells land about and the Stukas dive bomb and soldiers around him get killed and wounded, he's still trying to make a joke out of anything he possibly can, so much so that Rommel sends a message to Montgomery that unless Lance-Bombardier Milligan starts taking this war seriously he's going to pack up his Panzers and go home.

        Spike wrote these books 30 years after the events, but you can still feel the underlying trauma of this then 22yo guy trying to accommodate the mayhem going on around him, by attempting to joke through this insanity, the only real weapon this sensitive soul has other than his love of music. And the whole Italian campaign still in front of him. Not surprised that he finished up in a psychiatric ward for a spell near the end.

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"THE SECRET DIARY OF ADRIAN MOLE" - Sue Townsend 1982.


     I read this right after the weight and depth of "Siddhartha". I thought I needed something a little lighter, and pulled this small paperback out of my shelves. No way that neurotic, pimply, lovesick, thirteen-and-three-quarter year old Adrian Mole and his dysfunctional family and friends are going to strain the old neurones, a light, funny, easy read, and one of those simple best sellers that make you think - Why the hell didn't I think of that!?


     I found my battered pre-loved paperback copy in a small charity shop in Fort William, at the foot of Ben Nevis in the heart of the Scottish Highlands, when we stayed there back in the autumn of 2005. Someone had written in the flyleaf - "All great men have kept diaries, when are you going to start?" - which I assumed was directed at me personally so I had to buy it.


     But this book will always remind me of three things - how Herself and I climbed on Ben Nevis the first day we were there (note I say ON, as we didn't quite reach the top) - how absolutely crook we both were with bronchitis, spondolitis, and three types of slow-release, long-distance-aircraft-generated lurgi the following three days - and the colour of the autumn leaves we discovered in the glens up in the back roads of that totally brilliant place. So, a bit like wine, the love of a book isn't always just about the book itself, but the story that goes with it.


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"TWO MORE PINTS" (Roddy Doyle 2014)

    Irish, Booker Prize winner (with "Paddy Clarke"), and one of my favourite authors, the whole thing simply two blokes talking in a Dublin pub, chewing the fat in short conversations covering a pretty wide range of subjects, anything from a topless Kate Middleton to horsemeat in your burger!

    Roddy Doyle is possibly one of the few who could make that not just work, but work so well. Just LOVE this guy's simple earthiness and sense of humour. Consumed this one in three nights, breathed a soft "Ah, bugger!" when it ended. Just have to find the one before - "Two Pints".

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"MAJOR PETTIGREW'S LAST STAND" - Helen Simonson (UK/US 2010)

    Books and traffic have a lot in common. Some books are like my first (what can I say, it was 1988) experience of London's M25. To my genteel South Aussie commuter experience, it was a white-knuckle maelstrom of semitrailers and HGVs and the odd outside lane lunatic in his Porsche dicing with fate out there in the death zone. All the while both of my side windows were full of truck wheels spewing out English summer slush that is designed to foil the best windscreen wipers ever devised. It was not a happy day. And between them they set the pace and the rules and all you can do in your rented Renault campervan is grit your teeth, don't make any threatening moves, and ride it out to the end.

    Some books are like that, rapid action stuff that tailgates you along.

    But then, thank the Lord, some books are like a soft and easy Sunday morning drive on a back country road in Devon on a sweet day. THIS book is one of them.

    While Helen Simonson's writing is at all times unhurried, in no way does she ever wander off self-indulgently to explore the irrelevant, as some do - geez that drives you mad - but hangs on to your interest and your sense of involvement. She simply uses great creative fiction. And makes it look effortless.

     A sort-of love story - but much more than simply that - it's all about a widowed man and a widowed woman of "mature age" (geez I love that expression!) and their attempts to put a relationship together. He's a retired army major and deeply English-English of the "old school", and she's a shop-keeping Pakistani-English lady caught between cultures, and the two of them have to negotiate the petty racial, class, business, family, and village politics of their small world down by the Sussex coast, and it's a bumpy ride.

    I LOVED this book! If you aspire to great creative fiction that drives along at hedgerow-lane speed yet doesn't miss the smallest nuance, then do yourself a massive favour and find a copy of this book.

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    "DARTMOOR" - Arthur L Salmon (UK, c1940), colour plates by E. W. Haslehust

       I dialled in two book requests to our One Library system a week back, and the other day the first one popped up - "The Goldfinch" by Donna Tartt (US, 2013). It was probably the fact that it won the Pulitzer for 2014 that prompted me to put it on my Must Read One Day list, as it's an absolute whopper of a book, at ap 300k words, equal to three normal novels, and the back blurb doesn't read like something that would attract my attention. It went straight back into the Returns chute.

      But why?!  This is something you'd surely have to ask yourself as it slides out of sight - well, I had to anyway. WHY are you ditching a Pulitzer winner after reading only the blurb and the first two pages you philistine? Are you prejudiced against fat books? Well ... in a word ... Yes! Not sure what sort of a book bigot this makes me but I sort of think that if a writer needs 300k words to tell the story, won't it be a little ... fat? ... overweight? ... overwritten? ... sorry, I'm floundering here. (Stop and draw breath old son!)

      Okay, I just can't bring myself to start on a novel that's 3 novels long. There, I've said it. I don't have the time. Or the patience. Pulitzer or not. So it went into the chute. Out of hand. (Please all you purists, don't throw rocks. I have a sad case of pickiness. As pissweak as that sounds.)

      So, while waiting for the next novel to pop up, I pulled this small gazetteer-type book off my own shelf, one we bought in an Op Shop in England for a whole quid back in the mists of time, one printed and bound to "War Economy Standard", with watercolours by Edward William Haslehust (1866-1949).

      We've spent some time exploring Dartmoor off and on (I absolutely love the place, but Herself gets a bit over-awed by its dank moodiness) and this book is one of my favourites. Hence my re-visit. While I wait for a thinner book. A lot of the appeal of Dartmoor for me is the myths and legends it's attracted over time, along with the bleak scenery that probably stimulated the stories of hellhounds and ghoulies in the first place. If you'd like to have a quick peek at what's inside my head, two websites...

DARTMOOR FOR BEGINNERS

HASLEHUST'S DARTMOOR PRINTS


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"CHARLIE SAVAGE" - Roddy Doyle (Ire 2019)

    I'm a Roddy Doyle fan and he's one of the few writers who have more than two titles on my shelves. But I'm not biased. Well I am but "Charlie Savage" is still easily the best fun read this year. Or last year. Many years in fact. Doyle is to writing what Billy Connolly is to talking.

    The blurb says this is a compilation of a series done for the Irish Independent but you'd guess it was something like that by about the third chapter, as each one is just about exactly three-and-half pages and they go zip zip zip, bright and breezy and damn funny, every one of them middle-aged Charlie's own style of commentary on family, the world, and the passing social forces of the character's conservative working class suburban Dublin day. Some of the vignettes are classics.

    So, do yourself a massive favour and get hold of a copy of this winner. It'll make you want to become Irish and go and live in Dublin if you aren't already.

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