1000 Novels Everyone Must Read - Humour

[drasecretcampus]

A good day to be teaching about the Great Tradition today. 149 titles - too many of them by Waugh and Wodehouse and - good grief - Phil Farmer. Read, unfinished, hated. 24 out of 149? A few movies and tv versions as well.

Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (1954)
Martin Amis, Money (1984)
Martin Amis, The Information (1995)
Beryl Bainbridge, The Bottle Factory

Comments

[oursin]

Wot, no Mitford?
Poor show, horrible counter-hons, do admit.

[drasecretcampus]

I thought you were sensible hiding away from this? Given some of the multiply represented authors (and the illegal short story collections) which are here, a Mitford could have had room found for it.

[pigeonhed]

Well my ideas of humour often differ from the masses anyway. Sample dialogue:

Them: Have you no sense of humour?

Me: Yes I have a strongly developed sense of what is or isnt humorous, and you aren't.

This may explain my once describing The Wasp Factory as the funniest book i had read.

SO pleased to see nabokov listed and equally disappointed to see no Peacock.

[drasecretcampus]

It's a particularly nil disputum in matterum di digestum category - I still don't see Chaplin as funny whereas I do Keaton and Lloyd, although I can admire Chaplin's technique. Peacock might make it under ... travel?

[maryread]

Very Humour with the second U sort of list. What? I'm surprised by so little Twain, my thoughts leap to shorter form examples I guess.

Yet no Pratchett... wrong ghetto?

The first chapter of Consider Phlebas had me on the floor. But that particular effect waned.

Out of the 19? of these I've read, the only ones I've actually laughed aloud at were Catch-22 and Wodehouse (different Wodehouses tho). If I were thinking of reading more funny books, most of these would not be them. I get more of a grin out of Jane Austen every time.

I'll have to look over my reading list. It's not a category I've considered.

[drasecretcampus]

Maybe Pratchett and Banks are in sf/fantasy? I'm very, very afraid at this point. I have this feeling they came up with the lists and then categorised. Austen was bagged by love.

[maryread]

I suppose that would be okay, if they put Georgette Heyer in Historical. But Nooooo! Who picks the categories, that's what I always want to know. And who has custody of the janitors?

[iansales]

Another even dozen read for me. And 15 seen as films / television series (with a cheat or two - claiming "A Cock and Bull Story" as an adaptation of Tristam Shandy; and assuming that the Fry & Laurie Jeeves & Wooster TV series covered at least one of the books...).