I write books that I hope will make people laugh and feel better – so far, they are the three Jonathon Fairfax novels and a novella called The Pursuit of Coconuts. I suffer from depression, and have always found the world quite a difficult and confusing place, so – ever since I learned to read – I’ve escaped into books. Reading is so soothing and absorbing, and there’s something oddly intimate about joining an author inside a book. When a book’s genuinely funny, it feels as though – in a flash – it reveals the essential foolish absurdity of the world. I’ve listed five of the books that have worked that little miracle on me.
This is the third of the Jonathon Fairfax novels, though you don’t have to read them in order. It was inspired by my two years living in Berlin, and in particular the odd few days I spent being mistakenly treated in a stroke ward.
The book begins with Jonathon Fairfax waking up in a bin (that’s a trashcan for American readers), having no idea who he is. He’s taken to hospital for treatment, and that’s when people start trying to assassinate him. At this point he only knows three things about himself: he’s polite, he likes tea, and everyone wants to kill him. Jonathon has to find out why, how to get them to stop, and what the CIA has got to do with all this.
Looking through the small ads in the back of my parents’ newspaper (we got really bored before the internet), I saw one for a holistic detective agency – ‘missing cats and messy divorces a speciality’. My sister dared me to call. When I did, I heard a message saying, ‘This is Dirk Gently. If you’d like to leave a message, you can’t.’ It then revealed the existence of the book, which of course I bought.
It’s my favourite Douglas Adams: set in the real world, but standing at a finely calculated distance from reality. There’s the character who’s killed early on, but continues regardless. There’s the software that tells you why it’s a good idea to do whatever it is you want to do (the Pentagon uses an outdated version). There’s the sofa that gets wedged in a staircase in contravention of all known physics.
Then there’s Dirk himself, a living enigma who spends much of the book eating pizza. And there’s his immortal phrase ‘the fundamental interconnectedness of all things’, which allows him to search for a missing cat by, for example, going on holiday to Spain.
From Douglas Adams, the legendary author of one of the most beloved science fiction novels of all time, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, comes a wildly inventive novel of ghosts, time travel, and one detective’s mission to save humanity from extinction.
DIRK GENTLY’S HOLISTIC DETECTIVE AGENCY We solve the whole crime We find the whole person Phone today for the whole solution to your problem (Missing cats and messy divorces a specialty)
Douglas Adams, the “master of wacky words and even wackier tales” (Entertainment Weekly) once again boggles the mind with a completely unbelievable story of ghosts, time travel,…
This was among the first (and by far the best) of my parents’ books that I borrowed.
The premise is charming: after a long and careful study of British history, your memory will retain only a small quantity of garbled nonsense; so why not save time by just reading the garbled nonsense? At its best, it’s so freewheelingly, surreally silly that I still vividly remember crying with laughter. There were bits – like the names of the Wave of Pretenders – that made me laugh every time I read them.
It was a revelation to me that adults – and even adults from the past – could have brains that were just as silly, odd, and obscure as children’s.
"Canute began by being a Bad King on the advice of his Courtiers, who informed him (owing to a misunderstanding of the Rule Britannia) that the King of England was entitled to sit on the sea without getting wet." 1066 And All That is a book that has itself become part of our history. The authors made the claim that "All the History you can remember is in the Book" and, for most of us, they were probably right. But it is their own unique interpretation of events that has made the book a classic; an uproarious satire on textbook…
I read this during a period of temping when I was at university, and it was like an enchanted escape capsule from my job.
It was written in the late nineteenth century, but it doesn’t have the kind of starchy, pious formality of a lot of writing from that time. It feels very free and very modern, rooted in the details of everyday life that probably stay quite constant throughout history – like cheeky kids, the failure of all forms of waterproofing, and how annoying our friends are when we’re confined with them for any length of time.
It’s based on Jerome’s honeymoon trip up the Thames, but with his wife diplomatically replaced by two imaginary friends and a dog.
Three Men in a Boat, published in 1889, became an instant success and has never been out of print. In its first twenty years alone, the book sold over a million copies worldwide. It has been adapted to films, TV, and radio shows, stage plays, and a musical, and influenced subsequent writers such as P. G. Wodehouse, James Thurber, and Nick Hornby. It ranks among The Guardian’s top one hundred best English novels of all time.
Jerome’s light comic prose overtook what was intended as a series of magazine articles about the scenery and history of the Thames and became…
I’d never read any PG Wodehouse before I found this in a second-hand bookshop on Charing Cross Road. My edition is a huge and ancient green volume that looks like a book of magic – and it is.
It contains all the Jeeves and Wooster stories from the very beginning till the end of their golden age. And they’re in order, so you see the characters and style develop, and watch Bertie follow PG himself to America and back.
It came to me just when I needed it most: I had an absolutely horrible job at the time, the sort where you start dreading Monday morning around about lunchtime on Saturday. Being able to slip away into these stories was like owning a portal to a better world. They contain so many pleasures.
For one thing, PG can construct a sentence that somehow transcends its constituent words to become almost unbearably precious and charming. For another, the stories let you slip away into a parallel life in which you have a private income, a Mayfair flat and an omnipotent servant.
You rise late, eat breakfast in bed, bathe and dress, then stroll through London to your club. Your only problems are caused by overbearing aunts, friends in need and your own good nature. Occasionally, you bicker with Jeeves, but in the end he gets you out of whatever jam you’re in, and you reciprocate by destroying the vulgar shoes/tie/socks of which he disapproves. There has never been a better way to wash away reality.
This is the strangest of the books I’ve chosen. I found it by accident while looking for something else in the British Library, and loved it immediately. The writer was George VI’s doctor, and this is his only novel.
On the surface, it’s the story of a grotesquely unlikeable and hypocritical father and son. But I prefer to ignore that and just enjoy its completely unique voice. The whole book is like a PG Wodehouse sentence: somehow transcending its literal meaning to become almost magically pleasing. It’s definitely not for everyone, but if you enjoy the phrase ‘the aunt that had stood with my mother’s mother at the foot of the stairs’ then you’ll like it.
A Churchwarden, Sunday school superintendent, and President of the St Potamus Purity League, Augustus Carp is assiduous in exposing the sins and foibles of others while studiously ignoring his own. Although he campaigns against lechery, drinking, and smoking, he manages to indulge himself in plenty of other vices in the name of piety. The more seriously Carp takes himself, the more ridiculous he becomes. His frequent falls from dignity are uproarious—from his inability to climb off buses without falling over to his lifelong problems with flatulence. As a satire on hypocrisy, there is nothing quite like it in English prose.
Me and The Times offers a fresh perspective on those pre-internet days when the Sunday sections of The New York Times shaped the country’s political and cultural conversation. Starting in 1967, Robert Stock edited seven of those sections over 30 years, innovating and troublemaking all the way.
His memoir is rich in anecdotes and admissions. At The Times, Jan Morris threw a manuscript at him, he shared an embarrassing moment with Jacqueline Kennedy, and he got the paper sued for $1 million. Along the way, Rod Laver challenged Stock to a tennis match, he played a clarinet duet with superstar Richard Stoltzman, and he shared a Mafia-spiced brunch with Jerry Orbach.
Me and The Times: My wild ride from elevator operator to New York Times editor, columnist, and change agent (1967-97)
An intimate, unvarnished look at the making of the Sunday sections of The New York Times in their pre-internet heyday, back when they shaped the country’s political and cultural conversation.
Over 30 years, Robert Stock edited seven of those sections, innovating, and troublemaking all the way – getting the paper sued for $1 million, locking horns with legendary editors Abe Rosenthal and Max Frankel, and publishing articles that sent the publisher Punch Sulzberger up the wall.
On one level, his memoir tracks Stock’s amazing career from his elevator job at Bonwit Teller to his accidental entry into journalism to his…
