My Big Funny Summer Reading List

[Paul Cray]

Michael Frayn's novel of 1960s Fleet Street

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towards_the_End_of_the_Morning

It made me laugh out loud on the bus. In the US, it was published
under the title "Against Entropy". Make of that what you will.

There's quite a lot of Frayn and quite a lot of it is funny. He
reminds me a lot of David Lodge. I very much enjoyed "Headlong", a
farce about art and money, and am looking forward to "Skios", his most
recent novel, a farce about mistaken identity and the academic
conference circuit. "Sweet Dreams" is superb and was surely an
influence on Douglas Adams, It is set in a very British and middle
class Heaven. It takes a couple of days for the paters to arrive.
Well, Heaven is quite a long way away...

Paul

On 3 June 2013 11:27, Laura Kelber <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
> Thanks for the list, everyone. I knew i could count on you. I'm going to
> paste all the suggestions into a master list for future reference.  Going to
> start with Huxley's ... Dies the Swan, since I found it in my house.
>
> Laura
>
> On Jun 3, 2013, at 1:17 AM, jochen stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The Hoke Moseley books of Charles Willeford come to mind, beginning with
> Miami Blues after which you know if they are right for you. And some crime
> novels of Donald E. Westlake, Two Much for example. And I think, Pnin is a
> funny book
>
>
> 2013/6/2 <kelber at mindspring.com>
>>
>> Been dealing with some emotionally rough stuff lately, and need some
>> diversion. I can handle reading about Nazis, torture, toxic waste, and Man's
>> inhumanity to Man during the days, but at night I need some reading matter
>> that won't keep me lying awake in agony until dawn. Only it's damn hard to
>> find books that are both intelligent and genuinely funny. There's plenty of
>> humor in Pynchon, or in books like Catch-22, say, but it's accompanied by
>> stuff that's too dark for me in my present fragile-minded state. I can think
>> of plenty of funny movies and TV shows (Arrested Development, Season 4,
>> being the latest). And years later, I still laugh at the Mad Magazine
>> offerings I loved as a kid - heavy on parody and cranky sarcasm. But it's
>> really hard to think of many laugh-out-loud books. Offhand, I'm thinking
>> David Lodge (Nice Work, Small World, etc.); Alison Lurie (Imaginary Friends.
>> Probably should read more of her); Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim; No Name, by
>> Wilkie Collins. I'm sure we can all recommend lots of great books, but how
>> many at the top of our lists are genuinely funny, with no depressing
>> elements [NOT Pale Fire, for example]. Tangent to the
>> is-or-isn't-literature-morally-edifying conversation, is there something
>> about humor (wordplay, parody, genuinely funny insights about character)
>> that's too lowbrow for high-minded literary types to bother with?
>>
>> So, any recommendations of really funny books that aren't Shakespearean
>> comedies of error (sorry), and that don't remind one even obliquely of
>> genocide or cruelty to animals or toxic waste?
>>
>> Laura
>
>