Funny Books You Should Be Reading

All right. So now for my grown-up book recommendations, which, you know, are just so obvious that I pretty much walk around with a list of them in my head. No, the exact opposite is true. Ask me on any specific day to recommend some books and I’ll probably think of ones I just read that were good or books from many years ago that I never forgot or something else. I thought it would be a good idea to write some down here, but it turns out that again the exact opposite is true. I don’t know where to begin. The following authors and books are all pretty much funny. That’s where I’m starting.

1. David Sedaris. You know how certain books and almost all music can become heartbreaking if you’re in the wrong state of mind? Well, if you’ve come to that, it’s time for some David Sedaris. He is the cure for what ails you. I wrote a letter to him once many years ago (It was so long ago that I actually looked up his address in a Manhattan phone book and mailed him an actual letter. And he wrote one back to me from France!). Anyway, the letter started out, Could you be the funniest person alive? And I still kind of feel that way. In case you’re not familiar with David Sedaris (is this possible?) he writes essays about his family and incidents from his life and pretty much whatever happens to occur to him. Any book is fine, really. But be careful not to read him on the subway unless you don't mind laughing uncontrollably in front of strangers.

2. Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. Have you ever worked in an office? Then you will like, or rather love, this book. And even though the book is written in that potentially problematic first person plural (“we”) it works perfectly. See for yourself: “While waiting for Lynn to arrive, we killed time listening to Chris Yop tell us the story of Tom Mota's chair. We loved killing time and had perfected several ways of doing so. We wandered the hallways carrying papers that indicated some mission of business when in reality we were in search of free candy. We refilled our coffee mugs on floors we didn't belong on.” And did I mention that this book will make you truly laugh out loud? It’s one of those books that I think I need to read again, that is, whenever we unpack our 60 plus boxes of books.

3. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. This book is about dead bodies and it’s hilarious. If I compare Mary Roach to David Sedaris, it’ll do you no good, but I’m afraid I’ll have to do just that. To be honest, this is the exact sort of book I think David Sedaris wished he wrote, what with his fascination with bizarre medical equipment and human oddities and such. Basically Mary Roach went around checking out what exactly happens to bodies after they are dead, whether they are simply fancied up at a funeral home or used for medical research. And her observations are really pretty great. For example: “The human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken. I have never before had the occasion to make the comparison, for never before today have I seen a head in a roasting pan.” I mean, there is just so much here to love.

4. I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloane Crosley. All right, fine. If you think I got this book mostly because of the title, you’d be correct. But can I describe this book without referring again to David Sedaris? Um. Let me just say that this is a collection of very very funny essays about Crosley's life as a twenty-something living in New York. Oh my god, that sounds totally awful, doesn’t it? Except it’s not! She is genuinely funny and her topics are mostly unexpected or at least unexpectedly good. And here’s what made me like her even more: she turned three of the essays in the book into little plexiglass dioramas that she posted on her website. I mean, jeez, what’s not to like?

And now for my next post, I plan to write about the saddest books ever!

A Particular List in No Particular Order

During the summers when I was home from college I used to work at that big B. Dalton bookstore on the corner of 8th Street and 6th Avenue, which is now a Barnes & Noble, for what that’s worth. Every now and then (far less frequently than you’d imagine) some customer would come up to me and say, You probably hate this, but could you recommend a book to me? And I’d look at them like they were insane, like they really believed that I much preferred to spend my time taking books out of boxes over and over again, putting them on shelves which I’d have to rearrange anyway because someone was always messing with the alphabetical order. (What’s with those Mc authors? We all had differing thoughts on this. Do they get filed before the M’s or just alphabetically after Mb and before Md, if such combinations existed, but you get the point? And then there was always my snooty coworker who insisted that Gabriel Garcia Marquez be filed under “G” because technically his last name was really Garcia and too bad if the customers didn’t know that!) Anyway. My answer always was, Oh, no, I don’t mind at all! And then I’d give them way way way too many choices, too much information, and kind of overwhelm them with lots and lots of book ideas. I think I actually helped people only sometimes.

But now I’m thinking, what with it being the holiday season and all, I might just give some book recommendations right here. You know, for the best books ever!! You don’t think I’ve narrowed it down? Oh, I’ve narrowed it down all right. Just you wait.

However. Since this is such a daunting task, I’m going to start with children’s books, which are a little easier to narrow down. And I guess I’m really talking about chapter books since if I included picture books, well, I probably wouldn’t be able to stop writing. And so. These are chapter books that have been read aloud in our house and then read by one or both of my daughters by themselves. I dare not approach the YA books just yet.

1. The Neddiad: How Neddie took the train, went to Hollywood, and saved civilization by Daniel Pinkwater. Do you know who Daniel Pinkwater is? Because really. He’s only written about a million books! According to Neil Gaiman, he is the “best secret writer in the world.” True. Pinkwater has a particularly absurd sense of humor that I love (“La Brea” in Spanish means “the tar,” so “the La Brea Tar Pits” means "the the tar tar pits.”) and his books are always crazy and science fictiony and often involve chickens and New Jersey. You will not be sorry.

2. Ginger Pye by Eleanor Estes. Now, don’t get me wrong. Every single book written by Eleanor Estes is pretty much perfect. But this one might have to be my favorite. It’s set in the 1910s or so, around the time of her Moffat books, which are also wonderful. The story itself is great, how Jerry Pye buys his dog Ginger for a dollar and how this “intellectual dog” becomes famous around town and is then stolen and eventually found nearly a year later after a series of clues lead Jerry and his sister Rachel to him. But really, for me, it’s just the way Eleanor Estes writes. Just the details she includes that actually make you stop reading and think, man, that is terrific. You just can’t go wrong here.

3. When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead. First of all, a book set in New York City in the 1970s and also involving time travel?? What, did someone steal my list of perfect book ideas? As a kid I was always so thrilled to find a book set in New York City (see: Paul Zindel) because I could actually relate to at least some of it. But honestly you can read this book and not get any of the New York references and still love it. However, it might be a little challenging for some, only because the time travel part of it is tricky, but see, this is why adults need to read it too (twice maybe) to help with the explaining and because it’s just so excellent.

4. The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly. Holy cow, this book is great. Callie Vee is an almost twelve-year-old girl living in Texas in the hot hot summer of 1899 when the book begins. She’s got six brothers, but more importantly a grandfather that introduces her to the study of nature and science and things that girls her age are not supposed to have any interest in. The language in this book, a little fanciful at times, is nevertheless so right on, that it is a pleasure to read.

5. I don’t need to mention Harry Potter, right? I mean, you already know those are fantastic books. Or all the Laura Ingalls Wilder books? Yeah, I figured.

6. The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy by Jeanne Birdsall. Really, the title says it all. The four sisters in question spend the summer in the Berkshires with their (widowed) father and have wonderful adventures with a very interesting boy. Here, just check it out: “When our story begins, Batty is still only four years old. Rosalind is twelve, Skye eleven, and Jane ten. They’re in their car with Mr. Penderwick and Hound. The family is on the way to Arundel and, unfortunately, they’re lost.”

7. Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney. What’s surprising about this book is how funny it really is. I’ll admit that I cannot resist anything remotely comic-book-like, but when I picked it up I had only planned to skim through it instead of reading the entire book in one sitting (or lying) on the couch, actually laughing out loud. I think there are now four books in this series. All of them funny.

8. Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers. This book, published in 1972, is also set in New York City, which thrilled me as a kid, and maybe you know about the movie that starred Jodie Foster a long time ago, but really, it’s the book you want. The character of 13-year-old Annabel Andrews is so totally wise and snotty in just the right way. One morning she wakes up in her mother’s body and spends the day having what you might call adventures, which are really pretty hilarious. And actually the sequel, A Billion for Boris, is probably even better since it covers more than a single day, involves a TV set that foretells the future, and includes one scene in which Annabel and her friend go to a vintage clothing store in the Village. How I loved that book!!

I Never Read That Movie

This is not going to be a major revelation here, but if you read a book and then see the movie made about that book you will not like it. It’s just not possible. Doesn’t this make total sense? Forget about the fact that you can only picture the characters exactly as you envisioned them and likely Julia Roberts was not one of them. The main thing is you already know the entire story. You know how it ends. There are no surprises here.

I’m trying to think of the last movie I saw that was from a book I read and I just can’t because I just can’t do it. There were fantastic movies that were made from books that I never read, including, off the top of my head, “Fight Club,” “Clockers,” and “L.A. Confidential.” But what if I’d read the books? Would anyone really want to see “Fight Club” knowing how it would end? I won’t reveal the ending here, but trust me, you wouldn’t. Except there are those people, well, you know, everyone really, who rush out to read the book precisely so that they can then see the movie. But why? These are the very same people who will tell you that they liked the book better. Exactly.

The exception to this, as everyone knows, is A Clockwork Orange, which is just as perfect a book as it is a movie and I read and saw both about a million times each. But hang on, could I be talking about the exception that proves the rule? Let me digress for a moment. Okay, so you have the rule: movies made from books are never as good as the books. Then you have the exception: A Clockwork Orange. Now, how does this prove the rule? It proves that the rule is not a rule because there is an exception. It is the exception that disproves the rule. Is what I think! Except that if you google this expression, you’ll find a reasonable explanation that points out the origin of this legal saying that came from the Latin Exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis. So fine. What’s it going be then, eh?

There was me, writing about books and movies. So. What happens if you see the movie first and then read the book? This tends to work out pretty well and I’m not sure why. But to be clear I am not, repeat not, talking about those books made from Star Wars screenplays or movie tie-in books. I just mean the regular old book, though sometimes reading one of those can make you feel sheepish because the new edition of the book has a scene from the movie on the cover instead of the normal cover and it looks to everyone like you just bought the book because everyone was talking about the movie, which you did, but whatever. I’d probably read Fight Club is what I’m getting at.

This is all on my mind because a certain person in my household has taken it upon himself to methodically watch all the movies he missed since January 2001, which coincidentally was just after our older daughter was born. I believe he is now up to February 2001. When I mention us watching movies that came out, oh, I don’t know, last year, his response is, “Oh, we’ll get to it…eventually.” But luckily he tends to agree with me about movies made out of books. Which means that this new, er, long-term project will go just ever so slightly faster. Meanwhile, I’m just going to keep on reading what I’ve got here and pretend not to notice that “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows” is playing just down the block.

Reading Without Actually Reading

Whenever we visit my father and stepmother I always think I’m going to get some reading done. And so I will bring a book and at least one or two New Yorkers that I am, as always, in the middle of reading. But this is just false optimism on my part. What inevitably happens is that I will gather up a huge stack of my stepmother’s past issues of Martha Stewart’s Living magazine and then I will spend the entire weekend flipping through them, but not exactly reading them.

Those magazines are bewitching. They are as bewitching as Seventeen magazine was for me when I was a young girl. It’s kind of like, here are people about my age but they are nothing like me at all. Not even remotely. And they all look so fancy! And there’s always the feature article where it’s like some family just happens to be hosting this fantastic dinner party either out on their fabulous back porch with gorgeously placed lighting or inside their regular old dining room with a stunning hand-planed oak farm table and they just happened to invite the camera crew from Living magazine along. Or maybe I’m not actually getting something about this. Maybe this is exactly what happens? Either way, I find myself flipping through those pages again and again.

Which is also what happens whenever the new Cook’s Illustrated arrives in the mail. Ever since we made our very first recipe from the magazine, salmon cakes I believe it was sometime in 1998, we have been subscribers. And if you’ve ever had dinner at our house, well, at least some of it came from some issue of Cook’s. You know that triple mousse cake? Exactly. But anyhow, whenever we get it in the mail, I usually flip through it over and over again, while giving a running narrative of pretty much everything to my husband, who is almost always otherwise engaged. Something like: Ooh, look, I can make this chocolate raspberry torte! But wait, they actually call it a showpiece. Why are they calling it a showpiece? It has to look that pretty? I guess I can't make it. Oh, but wait, here is another recipe for sugar cookies, even though they already have a perfectly good sugar cookie recipe. But this time they are adding cream cheese. They are running out of ideas, I think. And look, look at these mashed potatoes. Let's make these tonight! Etc.

And that I don't think counts as reading as just more of that frenetic flipping through pages thing, which I seem to have perfected over the years. And is also what I do with any set of complicated directions, like for a digital camera, say. I think if you flip through something long enough the information will somehow make it into your brain through a kind of osmosis, thereby sparing you the necessity of actually reading the overwhelmingly detailed and wordy words on the page.

Thus allowing you time for things you really want to be reading, which might actually be The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris and whatever's in the latest New Yorker.

Color Special

When I was in first grade, there was a book in the library that I wanted to take out for weeks and weeks, but someone was always beating me to it. I remember the cover of that book so vividly I could probably draw it now from memory. The book I wanted so desperately was called, I believe, The Big Red Rock Eater Joke Book, which included the joke, “What’s big and red and eats rocks? A big, red rock eater.” This book also had the joke about firemen wearing red suspenders and what happened when you threw a white hat into the Red Sea. I mean, we are talking the absolute introduction to jokes of any kind. It is even possible to conclude that before I got this book I had never heard about the chicken crossing the road. It’s hard to believe that there really was a first time that we ever heard those jokes, and yet there must have been. But the part I also remember is that when I finally got to take the book out of the library and read those simple jokes over and over there was this vague disappointment that I couldn’t quite figure out. Was the book just not what it was cracked up to be? Was I already becoming jaded by the world’s oldest jokes?

Somehow that brings me to comic books. I suppose it’s because comic books are so rarely comic, much like jokes. But that doesn’t make them wrong. It was just my luck that the father of one of my best friends growing up owned a candy store in our neighborhood. This was back when you could get pretty much anything in a New York City candy store, including egg creams, but most especially comic books. And my friend got pretty much every comic her dad had in the store, and as a result, had boxes and boxes of them in her room. There were comics in those boxes that we read over and over again and comics we probably never got to. Now it’s quite possible that she had superhero comics, but we never got to those. It was the Archie comics that we spent hours poring over (and the occasional Richie Rich). I hardly remember any of the storylines, but every girl I knew liked Betty better than Veronica. The stories were all so outdated and so completely removed from our lives. And yet they appealed.

Which brings me to my own daughters’ fanatical love of Little Lulu comics, which we have lots of and in book form. The other night when we were eating spaghetti, my younger daughter said, You know, once Tubby ate an entire plate of spaghetti in one bite! And I found myself laughing not exactly because of what Tubby did, but simply because we all know who Tubby is.

It turns out that the very first Little Lulu comic strip appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in 1935. They went on for years and years and then stopped. And then in 2004, Dark Horse Comics began reprinting Little Lulu comics in book form. And a couple years after that, one of my dearest friends happened to give us a book of Little Lulu comics and that was how it all started.

You don’t need to know too much about Little Lulu to see why the books appeal so much. Lulu is pretty damn clever and she and Tubby are always solving mysteries in the neighborhood. Or when Tubby’s being a jerk with all the other neighborhood fellers in their clubhouse, Lulu enlists Annie to help get back at them. Do my girls laugh at these comics? Hardly ever. But have they read them so often that there are loose pages floating all over our house? Absolutely. And all of this was not just to say that I'm thrilled that my kids are reading. The thing is, I'm thrilled that they're reading comics.

A few minutes later...
My younger daughter: Did you know that Lulu and Tubby could get ice cream every single day? It only cost a dime!

Where Are All These Books Going, Where Have They Been?

We have moved. And as my older daughter said, Wow, it feels like we're living in a hotel! Well, sure, if it's the kind of hotel that has exposed lathing in the walls, plaster dust on the floor, and no doors on any of the rooms! I did not say. Don't get me wrong. It's not that I wouldn't want to stay in a hotel like that. It's just that I've never seen one like that.

Really, the thing is that we still have a lot of things in boxes. And at this point in time, the majority of boxes still unpacked contain all of our books.

Now a bunch of years ago, a guy named Bill Gates (famous only around here due to a distant cousin who murdered his entire family) made some very nice built-in bookshelves for our office. Then we moved and Bill Gates built us more bookshelves. And Bill Gates, if you’re reading this, sometime soon we’re going to need some new bookshelves at our new, um, hotel.

But back when we had those beautiful shelves, we put all our books on them and then spent lots of time admiring them. The books were arranged mostly alphabetically by author, which surprised many visitors to our office. I can’t believe you actually alphabetize your books! people would say, as though we did something completely unheard of. Sometimes my husband would explain that he had really wanted to arrange them by their Library of Congress numbers (true), but sometimes he would not.

And yet the way they were mostly alphabetical is that we had a whole bunch of books that we had no idea how to arrange and so they took up their own shelves: books about beer, travel books, books about building bat houses and tapping maple syrup and raising chickens and making your own soap, etc. And then we had a bunch of shelves devoted to literary journals, which once we read during a brief window of our lives.

And now they’re all packed up in numbered boxes (naturally) and I have to say that I don’t exactly miss them. And I wonder why we have so many of them. I mean, it’s a nice thing to look at all the books you’ve read, books by a favorite author, say, or a book you might have completely forgotten about, until you happen to notice it on a shelf. But in another way, since I don’t tend to reread books all that often, those particular books aren’t really being used anymore. It’s not like our records (also boxed up in numbered boxes), which get used over and over again. The books are there, I suppose, for our kids to read someday, and for our friends to borrow. And to admire, as I do sometimes, since they really do look so pretty on those shelves. I suppose you can think of them like photographs (also boxed up, but who knows where) that capture a moment in time, the moment in your life that you were reading the book.

It took my older daughter some time to understand that books are printed in editions, so that a book we had that was first published in 1922 was not the actual book that was printed in 1922. And maybe it both is and isn’t important to have the exact copy of the book you read. But just seeing that span of books on the shelves, mostly alphabetical, and extremely patient, makes you remember your reading life. So that is probably a good enough reason to keep building bookshelves. And putting your books back up on them.

Catch-18*

Just as you should never really judge a book by its cover (though of course we all do) you should also never judge a book by its title (though again: of course). I do know for a fact that there is a book out that discusses the original titles of books before they were changed into famous book titles, such as Trimalchio in West Egg being the original title for The Great Gatsby. How I know this is that the author of this book was a guest on that public radio show in New York City I once worked for. This was at a time when books like this really were able to be published with ease. And the book actually had a publicity team behind it.

Anyway. One of the absolute best titles of a book I can think of (which is also an excellent book) is Alice Mattison's book of intersecting stories called Men Giving Money, Women Yelling. I mean, jeez, you practically don't even have to read the book. You can buy it and just admire that title every single time you look at the cover. Some titles, like Infinite Jest, for example, sound cool and seem important. Or then there are titles like Roddy Doyle's The Woman Who Walked Into Doors and even Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which are wordy and evocative. In that category there is, of course, Raymond Carver's Will You Please Be Quiet Please?, which is a title that is very pleasing to say.

I find that one-word book titles don't really say enough, even though for bands that seems to be a fine way to go. The following are all good books, but they sound so ordinary: Jazz, Away, Intuition, Middlesex. The exception to this is Mary Roach's Stiff, a hilarious book about human cadavers.

There may actually be books that I have not read simply due to their titles, but I can't come up with any now. Well, here's one: Thermodynamics and an Introduction to Thermostatistics.

Whenever I think about writing a book, I actually like to think about the title most of all. I mean, then you’d just have to write the book, right? I’ve come up with Someone Else’s Weekend (there's nothing wrong with using a song lyric as a title, right, Brett Easton Ellis?), but as of yet I have not written that particular book. Somehow the title is almost too good for what I've been planning to write. It's getting me way too distracted. As far as I’m concerned, that particular title is up for grabs.

* The original title of Catch-22