Requiem for a Humanist

The Clue Bible: The Fully Authorised History of  "I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue", from Footlights to Mornington Crescent by Jem Roberts
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A thorough, if repetitive, study of the history of the antidote to panel games, this read is full of familiar gags.  It takes a similar format to From fringe to flying circus: Celebrating a unique generation of comedy, 1960-1980 and covers much the same people as it starts with the college shows and works its way through ISIRTA and beyond.
If you are looking for sexy photos of Samantha, forget it.  She's apparently not giving out - photos, anyway.
It was all very amusing until I came to the death of Humph at the end and I cried at that and at the description of the funeral, where they played the recording of him playing "We'll Meet Again."  Oh, gosh!
This is all the more touching because Tim, Graeme, and Bill brought me and my husband together.  Okay, maybe it was Alison Bean, but we've already thanked her.


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Manage the KIDS?

In all the years I've been doing storytimes, I haven't had nearly the amount of trouble with kids that I've had with the adults that come into storytime with them.  This doesn't mean I don't want them in there, just that I wish they would use some common sense.
Problem #1: Cell phones.  They forget to turn their cell phones off. The cell phone rings during storytime and the adult steps over the children on the way out, talking all the way.  Solution: Start each storytime with the Cell Phone Song:
    I went to the storytime with my mom,
    But she left
    Her cell phone on.
    The cell phone rang
    And she took the call.
    Now we're not allowed back in at all.*
And have the kids pretend to take out their cell phones, turn them off, and put them back in their pockets while glaring meaningfully at the adults.

I also have a sign that used to be posted on the wall (but now that we're in a new library, we can't put anything up until it gets all grungy and lived-in again).  The idea was that if the cell phone rang, the tiger would come out and eat the phone ... and anyone holding it.

These aren't the exact signs - but you get the idea.

Problem #2: Adults talking during storytime, daycare providers/teachers doing their work, or texting.  Rather than shame authority figures in front of their charges, I have a sign I hold up that has the "No cell phones" on one side and the "Please model good listening." on the other.  I may need to flash both.  I do mostly pre-school storytimes, so they can't read and the adults get the message.  If they don't get the message, some day, some day, I may just resort to public shaming.

The best storytime experiences I have had were with groups that had adults who participated.

* This song has more verses that involve restaurants and airlines and gets progressively vitriolic.  I hate cell phones.  Even though I own one, I rarely turn it on. Be in the moment, people!

Bertie Wooster Writes a Thriller

The Gun Seller by Hugh Laurie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hugh Laurie manages to mix humor with thriller, but I think I need less thrill in my life.  I am assured by my husband, who used to work for a US defense contractor, that while it is true that footage from the Gulf War is used to advertise military hardware, etc., no one, but no one, would develop a prototype helicopter or anything for the military without first being paid by the military and this hasn't happened since Abraham Lincoln took a consignment of rifles with interchangeable parts.  This takes a load off my mind.

Thomas Lang finds himself forced to become an international terrorist in this plot-with-more-twists-than-a-twisty-turny-thing.  As an Amurrikin, I am horrified to think that 1) the good ole US of A would sponsor terrorism for any ... ruh-roh, 2) that anyone would think that would even be a plausible ... aw, shee-it, and 3) Why doesn't everybody love us?! [Breaks down and sobs.]

Sprinkled herein are many witticisms about modern life as well as metaphors about sex stretched tighter than sausage casings on Lance Armstrong's thighs.  It's so easy to see the goofy side of Hugh Laurie in the lead role, right up until he starts killing people.  And he seems to know an awful lot about guns.  This does seem to be running backwards: a Brit going on lovingly about guns and an Amurrikin with a growing horror of them and descriptions of death, but it'd be a funny old world if we all ran to type.

I don't blame the author for hitting the US too hard.  In fairness, the Brits seem to be complicit in the scenario and the baddies are described as renegade CIA.  There's plenty of blame to go around.  Lang's background even includes his tour of duty as a servant of the oppressor in Northern Ireland, which goes to explain his military acumen as well as a reminder that the Brits don't always get it right either when dealing with terrorists.  Or at least it reminds me, since I seem to be one of the few that remembers IRA terrorism at a time when everyone else in this country seems to think terrorism was invented by a different religious group.

But, as I said, this was a bit too thrilling for me.  I've been typing this review for some few minutes and my heart rate is still up.  Other folks might find this tame, but it was a rollicking, riveting read and should satisfy the tastes of most people who aren't as namby-pamby as I.


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Dear Parents

Dear Parents of the cute children who come into the Children's Room of the public library,

Get this through your heads: we are not School.  Although committed to "lifelong learning" in our mission statement, this is just a ruse to make Reading For Fun more palatable come funding time.  Your lovely child slogs for nine months each year through the soul-crushing graded readers, the No-Child-Left-Interested required curricula, and, my personal bugaboo, the Dreaded Accelerated Reader tests.  Don't make summer just another opportunity to make reading a deadly chore. 

Do not:
Insist your child read only at or above her reading level during the summer.  No one really likes the Tiger Mom.
Tell  your child something is too old or too babyish for him. 
Shame your child by remarking in front of the entire library that she "didn't finish the books she checked out last time," so she can't have that many this time.  Books are not brussel sprouts. They don't go bad if they aren't read.  The only reason to limit books is if they tend to get lost.
Ask the librarian to back you up on your opinion of the books.  Hell's bells, I'm a 57 year old married woman!  I don't have the same tastes as a nine year old boy.  Okay, maybe I don't necessarily have his tastes.  Maybe he doesn't like the Three Stooges and comic books - ahem, I mean Graphic Novels.  Oooo, look! Captain Underpants!

Chances are, if your kid can relax during the summer and read something she enjoys (for a change), she might decide that reading isn't the big drag it was during the school year.  Who knows, it might make a big difference in her life.  So lay off the kids.  If you insist on riding their backs even in summer, just make sure it's something other than reading, like piano lessons and science camp until it runs out their ears.  There's nothing sadder in this room than seeing a kid be told he can't have a particular book for some reason.  Worse yet, making him come up and shuffle his feet while he tells me that he can't have that book.

Oh, and about complaints I've heard about Junie B. Jones - get over it.  You think your kid doesn't know bad language or behavior when she sees it?  [I'm still trying to figure out what Junie B.'s "bad language" is.]  You haven't taught your child what kind of behavior you expect?  He doesn't know the difference between fiction and reality?   Perhaps you just need to develop your sense of humor.  I understand that if you lack one, you might find the rest of us behaving irrationally.  Just think about it.

Fresh As the First Time I Read It

Something Fresh by P.G. Wodehouse

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I dearly love this book and its author, so take that into consideration when you read the review.  I also used it for a dramatic reading in college (just happened to see the notes for that in my paperback copy) and managed to get through what I thought was the funniest part without breaking up.  To my best recollection, the listeners did not fall over in paroxysms of hilarity, but I may have been numbed to their reaction in order to get through it.

Yes, it's as funny as it was the first time. 

The Hon. Freddie Threepwood is engaged to Aline Peters, but his father (Clarence, the third Earl of Emsworth) has just "stolen" her father's prized scarab in a typical fit of forgetfulness. He now wants to retrieve some letters he wrote to Joan Valentine when she was on the stage but his go-between, R. Jones, has decided to milk more out of him than the 500 pounds he didn't need to give Joan because she said she threw the letters away.  Joan is an old friend of Aline and promises to help her retrieve the "stolen" scarab, however, Joan's new friend, Ashe Marson has been hired by Aline's father for the same dark purpose.  George Emerson fell in love with Aline on board ship and is using his friendship with the Hon. Freddie to get close to her again.  Got all that, or do you need a diagram?  They all convene (save R. Jones) at Blandings Castle where they land under the beetling brow and jaundiced eye of Freddie's father's secretary, the Efficient Baxter.

Wodehouse tackles the theme of equality of the sexes with a deft hand one would not expect from an author of that time period (ah, but it's comedy, so he can get away with that).  Sadly, it's not developed fully and it does wobble at the end when Joan succumbs to Ashe's petition for marriage.  We don't get to see her fall in love with him the way we see him fall for her and her sudden craving for dullness in place of adventure doesn't ring true.  We do get to see Aline fall in love with George and we are with her when she does.  She is obstinate in her keeping the engagement to the Hon. Freddie in the face of George's high-handedness, but begins her melt when he realizes that it rightly doesn't work to badger the one you love into loving you.  Her subsequent interview with her fiance gives her the opportunity to view what life would be like married to a complete ass.  The romance of living in an English castle among the peerage loses its appeal. 

One of Wodehouse's earliest successes, Something New (or Something Fresh) introduces the third Earl of Emsworth and the gang at Blandings.  It is also rich in over a dozen Biblical references and about 40 other literary and Classical references (at least according to the annotations I found online).  Unlike the Bertie and Jeeves stories, it is narrated by what is normally called an omniscient narrator, but you can see an inkling of Bertie in the narrator's casual forgetfulness as well as the Biblical saltings (Bertie having won a Bible verse contest of some kind in his youth).  The novel also demonstrates the winning formula Wodehouse finally developed and delightfully abused for another 70 books or so: something needs to be stolen (whether scarab, silver cow creamer, painting, manuscript, or necklace) and returned to its true owner, true love will out, and the Hon. Freddie and his chinless comrades will never get married.  Although Wodehouse admitted to writing the same story over and over, it's the details of characters, the lovely language, and the absurd slow-motion description of slapstick that make each successive novel something fresh.



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Words of One Syllable Dept.

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


A light-hearted romp through the study of life's most serious business.  I picked this up because I enjoyed Stiff so much.  Roach writes the same way people chat about things, with wry humor and personal anecdote (Boy, is her husband ever game), which is engaging and yet she manages to keep it informative.  I am amazed that these researchers let her anywhere near them, considering the official opinion on their research. 




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Oy! It's Raining Mrs. Danvers!

First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This was hard to follow. I think the Nursery Crimes stories are more linear. Well, you get into time travel and everything goes arse over bristols, dunnit? There are so many minor plots going on, just like one of them tv shows with all the interweaving plots that are supposed to be making us smarter. I guess I just haven't been watching them.
Thursday's troubles are legion in this book: a teenage son who resolutely behaves like a teenage son and not the chronoguard genius he grew up to be that she met in other stories; she's mentoring both of her fictional selves at Jurisfiction, book reading is declining fast and the fictional world only has crackpot ideas for reviving it; apparently history is going to fold up on itself and time as we know it will end because they've neglected to invent time travel and have been merely accomplishing it on the strength of it having been invented at some point; and, Where's Jenny? Also, everyone's trying to kill her as usual.
It's just so nice to see a 50+ female character with a family and a nice job laying carpet (ha!) so active!
Am still listening to the audiobook, which is okay, but doesn't have the characterization to it that, say, Nigel Planer brings to things.

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Confessions of a PDR

The Fourth Bear by Jasper Fforde


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Fforde again injects silliness for its own sake into what this time is a typical Ken Follett tale. DCI Jack Spratt is taken off a case before it even starts, which queers his bid to enter the Guild of Detectives. He is on forced medical leave until it is determined he's sane enough to continue ... in a job where a little insanity helps. The case is the escape of the same serial killer he captured previously - who will certainly want his revenge, right? But there's much more than that - National Security is involved and, worse yet, his wife doesn't know he's a PDR, a person of dubious reality. What if she finds out? Who is killing champion cucumberistas? How are those bears getting their paws on controlled substances, such as ... porridge? Where's that Dorian Gray guy who sold Spratt his car?
There were so many characters that actually appeared (as opposed to mentioned or referred to or already deceased) in this book that I filled a whole 8 1/2 x 11" sheet of paper trying to keep track of them! I'm wavering between 3 and 4 stars, but hey! The piece about Pippa's pregnancy is just so precious!
Fforde sends up so many thriller/detective story conventions in this story that you wonder what's left to skewer in the sequels!

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Put It All Together, It Spells MADRE

Gator A-Go-Go: A Novel by Tim Dorsey


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Florida's manic son and America's most fun-loving serial killer, Serge Storms, is at it again. This time he is making a documentary of the Spring Break tradition in his beloved state. On the way, he becomes lovingly entwined in an organized crime family vengeance. I thought it wasn't much of a mystery and had that dejá vu feeling one gets when stories get repetitive and old characters resurface. I was over a third of the way in before it seemed to take on anything different.
But that's why I read them: the mayhem, the inventive gruesomeness of it all that makes me really wonder about Tim Dorsey. Now, I think I saw another one on the rack ...

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Bittersweet

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Read the Kindle edition this time, while I was away. The footnotes, while fiddly, are handled well. You click on the link and it sends you to the end of the book for the footnote, then press "back" to return to reading. Also have the condensed audiobook read by Tony Robinson. It's a shame his readings of Pratchett's works are condensed because I love his characterizations. There is a problem with some of the lines being too soft to hear if you're listening while driving on the highway in a cheap car and, well, you just miss so much in an abridged story. Someday I hope to acquire the unabridged Nigel Planer version. Planer also does a first-rate job, but the cost of the audiobooks he reads are prohibitive unless you subscribe to audible.com .

This, the first in the Watch series, is a story about bitterness and how we handle it. Captain Vimes funnels his into (or out of) a bottle (or more than just "a" bottle), the spinster Lady Ramkin devotes her life to the care and welfare of pets (of a sort), and the bitterness of the Elucidated Brethren becomes incarnate. Along with Captain Vimes, we meet Carrot Ironfoundersson, the Disc's tallest dwarf, who wouldn't know bitterness (or a metaphor) if it dared to slap him upside his head; Cheeky Nobby Nobbs (the Disc's shortest non-dwarf); and the man with the lucky arrow, Sergeant Colon. We observe the Patrician's peculiar methods of employee motivation and pest control. As usual, Pratchett turns a fairytale inside out. A king is found to save the land from the predations of a dragon, but although the core story doesn't work out the way expected, it does work out to the satisfaction of the reader.

Highly recommended. In fact, it's a million-to-one chance you'll love it. Stands to reason.

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Polly Wanna Wossname

Eric by Terry Pratchett


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I'm not the Rincewind fan some might be. Even less if David Jason is playing him. I don't understand that at all (of course, I looked up the dvd on Amazon to check the name of the actor and discovered that "The Color of Magic" was finally on sale in a format I can use ... and bought it immediately. Soooo, so much for that opinion!) and think Nigel Planer would have been a more likely Rincewind. Anyway, I needed something light and refreshing after that Anthony Trollope oeuvre, and ordered this for the Kindle. It was about 1/10 the size and just what the "Wizzard" ordered.
Rincewind stories fall into the "It's just one thing after another" category that my friend's mother complains about. Of course, she applied it to Pixar's "Finding Nemo" but it does describe the Rincewind stories in general and this one in particular [Interesting Times is an exception:]. That doesn't mean it isn't pure delight. The Kindle version did not have the illustrations the original did, so I can't comment on that. Rincewind would lend himself to a comic book or graphic novel format, considering the episodic nature of his adventures.
In this story, Rincewind is accidentally conjured up by a teenage boy Faust wannabe. It's all an excuse to send up the Faust legend, pre-Colombian civilization, Trojan War mythos, physics (one of Pratchett's favorite targets), and the infernal office politics engine (which justly deserves anything thrown at it). They are all nicely skewered but I think the last two parts suffer from inadequate development.

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How to Murder Your Parents - the Passive-Aggressive Way

The Willoughbys by Lois Lowry

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
Oh, what hath Lemony Snicket wrought? True, authors are leaping on the bandwagon trying to capitalize on his popularity, but sometimes they come up with something good, some anti-treacle, a refreshing burst of acid for those tired of the usual children's fare.
This book, "nefariously written & ignominiously illustrated" by Lois Lowry is a very good story that disguises a vocabulary lesson. Like A Clockwork Orange the glossary is at the end and isn't discovered until too late when the reader has had to winkle out the meanings from context (at least that's what happened to me 30 years ago - I was quite annoyed to finish the book and then find the glossary after struggling through the first 5 pages). This makes it different from the Lemony Snicket books which define the more colorful words within the story.
The narrative runs counter to the usual derivative glurge written for children, but happily lists the classic originals at the end for further reading and comparison: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Anne of Green Gables, The Bobbsey Twins and Baby May, A Christmas Carol, Heidi, James and the Giant Peach, Jane Eyre, Little Women, Mary Poppins, Pollyanna, Ragged Dick, The Secret Garden and Toby Tyler.
In this book, parents and children conspire to get rid of each other. The Willoughby kids actually want to be orphaned. They hope their parents will be eaten by crocodiles - and in chunks, because we know what happens when crocodiles don't chew their food. They rescue a baby left on the doorstep by dropping it at the door of a reclusive millionaire, which leaves her much better off than if she'd remained with the Willoughby's egocentric and hostile parents. The impossible happens, thanks to the Odious Nanny and Lowry's pen, and the deserving live happily ever after.


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Fortunately, His Writing Got Better ... I Think

Desperate Remedies by Thomas Hardy

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars
Whatta potboiler this was! And as lame his use of mystery conventions (I was fairly groaning at the creakiness of it all) was, the heavy-handed manipulations had my heart rate up and drove me on to the end of it.

As for the characters, the main ones weren't very round or realistic (the young Cytherea was as wet a crustacean that ever got herself stuck in a pot and transferred to boiling water), but that was probably indicative of the time it was written. The heroine, assigned to do some research to help her case threw up her hands after one session of looking through newspapers and went palpitatin' to a chair, leaving her brother and lover to do all the legwork.

Who really believes that you can actually catch your death of cold out at night following a miscreant or that you can take to your bed, have what sounds like a stroke at bad news, be told you will recover, but because you've had them before know for certain that you won't?! What sense does that make?!

Read it for the laughable situations (keep that table between you and the Bad Man!) and dramatic hyperbole which have to be seen to believed, but there are some nice descriptions and amusing rude mechanicals. Oh, and a punchline at the end!


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And I Don't Even LIKE Zombies!

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance - Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem! by Jane Austen

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
This has improved Jane Austen beyond all knowing! Just before you get bogged down in the manners, zombies attack or they debate the relative qualities of Shaolin Chinese vs. Japanese martial arts. Of course, every now and then it steps over the line into being silly (taking the bite out of the heart of an enemy, for example - I mean, you're fighting zombies! You shouldn't be stooping to their level!).

I think one of the best things about the book are the discussion questions. Bwah-hahahahaaaa!

This was read on the Kindle2 - the last few chapters read by the computer generated voice that pronounced "Lady" as "laddie," "lame" as "lamé," and mangled other words beyond recognition.


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Death In the Family

A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
Rather a thick book for Moore, I thought. I picked this up because I like Pratchett's character of Death and wondered what Moore would do with it. What he does is totally different, in some ways, but when you get down to it, it's still someone who separates souls from the bodies of the dead. Charlie Asher is just more a recycler. Despite the portents of the Doom of the Age of Mankind, the underworld creatures are wonderful characters and delightfully dim. Their dimness takes much of the scariness away, and that's fine with me. I was drawn quickly into the story and stayed up a couple of nights reading.

As for the Luminatus - well, I don't think that was very surprising, if indeed it was supposed to be.


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Love That Crazy Eddie Muldoon!

Real Ponies Don't Go Oink! by Patrick F. McManus

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
There are two gut-wrenchingly funny stories in this book: "A Good Deed Gone Wrong," which I can't even think about without laughing, so I'm not going into it now, and "Zumbo and the Misty Mountain Ghosts." I love McManus's stuff. Some of the stories are funnier than others, but most of them make me laugh out loud. McManus, like Wodehouse, will set up a slapstick scene and then turn it around, or turn it inside out, and then walk you through each angle of the pratfall or of the flying pie, milking it for all it's worth.

I had people coming out to look at me to find out why I was laughing so uncontrollably. My husband has walked through the house and come out to the porch to see what was so damn funny.

And I don't even like huntin' and fishin' stories! I hope this man's a millionaire. He deserves it.


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It's the Big One! The Big One-Oh

This book by Dean Pitchford had a lot going against it. It's written by a Broadway "star" and songwriter. It has glowing comments by literary greats like Jamie Lee Curtis and John Lithgow on the front and back covers. As much as I'd like to trash this book for being part of the Famous People Who Think They Can Write Children's Books Conspiracy*, I'm afraid I'll have to admit that this is a cute book. There isn't even a huge amount of exaggeration in it, well, except that a nine year old would make "veal osso buco with shallots in a red wine reduction" ... or even be able to pronounce that. Y'all, I do know humor when it's presented. I suspect that bit (and the bit where his mom refers to it as "beef stew") was thrown in to amuse the adult readers. Other than the culinary exploits of Chef Charley, age nine, I can see all of this happening. Man, I can just hear the high-pitched squealing!
My child's heart aches for a kid with no friends. Hell, even I had friends as a child and I had to make new ones each time we moved. Charley Maplewood has to navigate the undertow of bullies, kid politics, and the unfamiliar choke-hold of puppylove, all of which Pitchford handles with humor and grace. His father is literally distant (working in another country) and unable to remember his son's correct birthdate. His mother is over-worked and has bad taste in boyfriends. And if he's going to learn about love from watching his sister in action, well, he's in for a rocky ride down the pike.
I would recommend this book for boys, because there's enough gross-out in it to appeal to them. Girls, of course, would read anything, but they'll relate to the depth of emotional development and even some, like Jennifer, Charley's unbidden admirer, will relish the ghoulish bits. I know I would think it was cool to live next door to someone who made special effects.

* I don't have anything against Curtis's books or Lithgow - but who died and made them Literary Critics? It's the Madonna and Katie Couric books that make me all frowny-faced when I shelve them, which isn't very often - ha ha ha.