My Big Funny Summer Reading List

[Charles Albert]

My favorite Murder - Ambrose Bierce

Mark Twain skewers James Fenimore Cooper -
http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/rissetto/offense.html

Porterhouse Blue, Riotous Assembly - Tom Sharpe

love,
cfa


On Sun, Jun 2, 2013 at 5:18 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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