Joy in the Morning by P. G. Wodehouse

“It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can't help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect. I explained this to Jeeves, and he said much the same thing had bothered Hamlet.”

In the past 3 years, I have read aloud what I believe to be every Wodehouse story, novella, and novel about Bertram Wooster and his butler, Jeeves. When I read Right Ho, Jeeves back in 2010, I didn't expect to read another; but while sitting in the car waiting for something, there was a Jeeves book in the glove-box. I read a couple pages, decided to read Liz a funny part, had to start on page one for context and here we are.

The corpus consists of 11 novels and 35 short stories, though there is some contention about whether some of the early stories, starring a guy named Reggie instead of Wooster, should be counted in that number as most of those stories were rewritten later for Bertram. But I digress.

For the completely unfamiliar, the stories follow Bertram Wooster, an upper class twit, good-hearted but "oofy", and his wise beyond all reason valet, Jeeves. All but one, Ring for Jeeves, are narrated by Wooster, and all involve a series of misunderstandings, usually brought about or at least exacerbated by societal expectations. All eventually seems lost, until we learn in the end that Jeeves has been working behind the scenes and that all is well.

When Chris, on my recommendation, read Code of the Woosters, he had this to say:

I liked The Code of the Woosters. I didn't exactly develop a lifelong addiction, like some people do; in fact, I probably won't read another one of these. I expect, rightly or wrongly, that they mostly all go the same way.

And he is, more or less, correct. Indeed, some of the plot points recur in almost every book--Bertie accidentally becomes engaged to a woman he doesn't want to marry, often on a rebound from one of his many friends; Bertie is coerced into carrying out some unpleasant social business for his aunt; Jeeves reads Spinoza, a philosopher well-suited for a man who seems to run the world as an extension of himself; Bertie has an article of clothing/piece of art Jeeves hates (and will eventually dispose of). There are even two separate books that revolve around Bertie's theft of the same cow-shaped creamer ladle!

And yet, the books are compulsively readable and often very funny, largely due to Wodehouse's absolute mastery of Bertie's voice, with which he never produces an anodyne sentence. Reading one for the first time, one is struck by the preponderance of lingo, most of which seems to have never really existed outside of Wodehouse's novels.  For example:

You know, the way love can change a fellow is really frightful to contemplate. This chappie before me, who spoke in that absolutely careless way of macaroons and limado, was the man I had seen in happier days telling the head-waiter at Claridge’s exactly how he wanted the chef to prepare the sole frite au gourmet aux champignons, and saying he would jolly well sling it back if it wasn’t just right. Ghastly! Ghastly!

Further, there is, if not exactly character development--Bertie never, thankfully, outgrows his dependence on Jeeves--growth. Early on, Bertie feels cowed asking Jeeves for help, and often goes his own way, returning only when the straits are dire; later on, Jeeves is always stop number one. Bertie is forever searching for words, which Jeeves provides, and attempting to quote poetry, which ditto, and as the novels progress, Bertie incorporates these words and lines into his narration. Little things, satisfying nods to the continuity of the Jeeves/Wooster relationship.

The books are fundamentally about relationships, to each other and to society. Upper-class British society and its often confounding mores are the machine that drives the plot, and Wooster's stable of friends both male--Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, Gussie Fink-Nottle, Stilton Cheeseright--and female--Rosie M. Banks, Madeline Bassett, Stiffy Byng--provide the old oil. In spite of being the best known in popular culture, Jeeves himself is largely a foil for Wooster, disappearing for large chunks of the narrative to allow the plot to thicken, springing into reader-visible action only in the last act. There's rarely any explicit criticism of the class differences inherent in the Wooster-Jeeves relationship, though one can certainly intuit from the large cast of incompetent trust-fund adults that the serving class, of whom Jeeves is representative, is what really keeps society from collapsing.

And here we are at the end and I've said nothing about Joy in the Morning specifically, and there's a reason for that. The plot is more-or-less what I've outlined above, though it's one of the better books (Code of the Woosters may be the best), and I probably won't review the rest of the Jeeves books indiviudually. I like these books and find them comforting, fun, and funny. And I guess that's it.

Love's Labour's Lost by William Shakespeare

BEROWNE:
...From women's eyes this doctrine I derive.
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain, and nourish all the world;
Else none at all in aught proves excellent,.
Then fools you were these women to forswear,
Or,  keeping what is sworn, you will prove fools.
For wisdom's sake, a word that all men love,
Or for love's sake, a word that loves all men,
Or for men's sake, the authors of these women,
Or women's sake, by whom we men are men--
Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves,
Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths.

Love's Labour's Lost promises us a love story, and delivers a bitter pill.  The setup is right out of some Medieval rom-com: The King of Navarre and his retinue, Dumaine, Longaville, and Berowne, take an oath to forswear women for three years so they might devote themselves to serious study.  Only Berowne sense that this is a bad idea, and predicts that they'll all break their oaths before long:

Necessity will make us all forsworn
Three thousand times within this three years' space:
For every man with his affects is born,
Not by might mast'red, but by special grace.
If I break faith, this word shall speak for me,
I am forsworn "on mere necessity."

The predictable thing happens next: women arrive, in the form of the Princess of Aquitaine and her retinue, and the King and his men fall deeply in love, each with a different woman.  Each man tries vainly to woo his love's object while keeping it hidden from the others.  This leads to a very funny scene in which each male character enters reading aloud a love poem of his own devising, and then, when he hears the next one approaching, scuttles into hiding.  Each poem is worse and worse, until finally there are three guys hiding, to various degrees of each others' awareness, listening to Longaville's shitty poem, which begins "On a day--alack the day!-- / Love, whose month is every may, / Spied a blossom passing fair / Playing in the wanton air."

Once they spend a little while shaking their fingers at each other, the menfolk put their heads together to try to woo the Princess and her maids.  Though his prediction is proved correct, Berowne comes in for the worst criticism, because his beloved, Rosaline, is supposedly exceedingly ugly and "black," or dark-skinned.  As the King says, "I'll find a fairer face not washed today."  This echoes with the presence of the "dark lady" of the sonnets, who is equally ugly ("My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun"), equally crass and sordid, and yet whose attraction is--for Berowne as for the speaker of the sonnets--unavoidable.

Love in Love's Labour's Lost has all the dressing of poetry and courtly romance, but at its bottom, it's like Berowne's love for Rosaline: inexplicable, physical, almost bestial.  Rosaline treats Berowne with bitter jabs, and he is helpless.  The other women, sensing that the men's sincerity is questionable, play a trick on them by switching their masks.  (Why are they wearing masks?  Why not?)  The men, as they suspect, cannot tell one from the other without their physical likenesses.  The play which seemed, at the beginning, to set up a predictable course toward resolution, seems to suggest that the dynamics of human love and sex are irresolvable: men obsess, and women rebuff.

The play ends when the real world interrupts the childish play of love: a messenger comes to inform the Princess that her father has died.  The King, like an entitled MRA, demands to be loved: "Now, at the latest minute of the hour / Give us your loves."  The women impose harsh penitences in exchange, perhaps knowing that the men will not keep them: The King must spend a year as a hermit, and Berowne, healing the sick.  Some sources suggest there is a lost sequel to the play--Love's Labour's Won--perhaps in which the King, Berowne, and all the rest complete their hairshirt requirements and win the ladies they sought to woo.  But I doubt it.

The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett

“Rincewind, all the shops have been smashed open. There were a whole bunch of people across the street helping themselves to musical instruments, can you believe that?”

“Yeah,” said Rincewind, picking up a knife and testing its blade thoughtfully, “Luters, I suspect.”

It’s always a challenge to write decent reviews of light literature. It's easy to think of something to write about Ulysses, Othello, or Malcolm X, but what can be said about fluff, the sort of books that aren’t guilty pleasures, exactly, but which occupy a place in between real literature (Hamlet) and trash (Twilight)? I tend to read Discworld or John Grisham as palette cleansers after something particularly challenging, but it’s not exactly fair to demote such books to being simply trifles. After all, reading is a pleasurable, as well as mentally stimulating activity, and these books offer their own pleasures. If you enjoy reading high literature at all times, by all means, do it; I’ll take to occasional potboiler or adventure to mix things up.

Of course, low literature has enjoyed something of a renaissance in recent years, with authors like David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, Neil Gaiman, and even Thomas Pynchon taking cues from less lofty genres, but, while these and many other authors have genuine affection for the material they homage and reference, it’s hard not to read a little postmodern irony into their genre exercises—after all, something like Pynchon’s Inherent Vice might nod toward Carl Hiassen and Donald Westlake, but could hardly be mistaken for one of their books.

So, that said, The Light Fantastic is a Discworld book, the second, and it’s worlds better than the first, The Colour of Magic, in that it actually a) has a plot, rather than feeling like a series of comical vignettes strung together and b) feels like a Discworld book tonally, in spite of still being embryonic in the bigger scheme of things. It’s fast-moving, short, and introduces many of the characters that populate the later books. Aside from that, I don’t have a lot to say about it. It’s not particularly satirical, except when satirizing fantasy literature itself, and it’s not as funny or as well-plotted as the later books, but I enjoyed reading it, as I always enjoy Pratchett’s novels. It may be pulp, but it’s my pulp.

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

ORSINO: If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die.
That strain again! It had a dying fall;
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odor. Enough; no more.
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

Twelfth Night opens on a panorama of grief. The twins, Viola and Sebastian, grieve for each other, thinking their sibling drowned in the shipwreck that separates them. The Countess Olivia grieves for her dead brother, refusing the Duke Orsino's advances on the grounds of mourning. Orsino grieves over Olivia's refusal, though it's not difficult to conceive that his bitterness, which wells up after he notes the "dying fall" of his musicians, may originate elsewhere.

Perhaps the comedic elements of Twelfth Night, then--Viola's disguise as Cesario, Sir Toby's antic pranking, and the arbitrary-seeming shuffling of romantic partners--suggest a darker element toward which the play's topsy-turvydom provides, if not a corrective, a brief respite. For those unfamiliar: Viola, shipwrecked on the Illyrian coast, disguises (for some reason) herself as a boy and becomes a servant of the Duke Orsino, with whom she falls madly in love. But Orsino only has eyes for Olivia, and unwittingly tortures Viola by sending her to repeatedly declare his love, a scheme which has the complicated consequence of sending Olivia head over heels for the disguised Viola.

In the B-plot, the pranksters Maria and Sir Toby Belch, along with their idiot friend Sir Andrew Aguecheek, gull the cheerless Malvolio, Olivia's steward, into believing that Olivia is in love with him. Malvolio is the only character who refuses to partake in the celebratory atmosphere of the play, and disapproves of such salubrious activities as carousing and joking, saying of Olivia's fool:

MALVOLIO: I marvel your ladyship takes delight in such a barren rascal. I saw him put down the other day with an ordinary fool that has no more brain than a stone. Look you now, he's out of his guard already. Unless you laugh and minister occasion to him, he is gagged. I protest I take these wise men that crow so at these set kind of fools no better than the fools' zanies.

OLIVIA: Oh, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste with a distempered appetite.

Malvolio, having wandered in from some other world and declared himself an enemy of laughter, probably gets what's coming to him. He is essentially cast in the play's masque against his will, convinced by a faked love letter that wearing a ridiculous get-up (yellow stockings with cross garters) and smiling ceaselessly will prove his love for Olivia. In an essentially comic play, this play would be sustained until Malvolio's utter embarrassment and possibly reform, but in Twelfth Night the prank results in Malvolio being cast into a madman's dungeon.

We might still laugh at Malvolio in this state, but our laughter is increasingly discomfiting, and undermines the relief that Twelfth Night has promised us. This is nothing compared to the sudden possibility of violence that Orsino threatens upon Viola, whom he has discerned is the object of Olivia's affection:

ORSINO: Why should I not, had I the heart to do it,
Like to th' Egyptian thief at point of death
Kill what I love?--a savage jealousy
That sometimes savors nobly. But hear me this:
Since you to nonregardance cast my faith,
And that I partly know the instrument
That screws me from my true place in your favor,
Live you the marble-breasted tyrant still.
But this your minion, whom I know you love,
And whom, by heaven I swear, I tender dearly,
Him will I tear out of that cruel eye
Where he sits crowned in his master's spite. --
Come boy, with me. My thoughts are ripe in mischief.

VIOLA: And I, most jocund, apt, and willingly,
To do you rest, a thousand deaths would die.

Suddenly, without warning, we are transported to Othello. Orsino's bloodlust is not so shocking; his overtures to Olivia have always had the air of a madman and a solipsist, but Viola's glee at the prospects of her death is one of the most unnerving moments I can think of in Shakespeare. Where are we, and what has comedy wrought? Of course, Sebastian shows up at the last minute to fix everything (conveniently becoming the new, more appropriate object of Olivia's affections) and Orsino marries the servant he was about to murder, his bride still in Cesario's breeches. But one wonders what the play might have been like if Sebastian had been just moments too late. It's true what they say, I suppose--in comedy, timing is everything.

Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare

Much Ado About Nothing is about love, and by its own admission then love matters very little. The characters within take love very lightly: Chiefly Claudio, a hero of the Prince Don Pedro's army who falls in love with Hero, daughter of Leonato, Governor of Messina. It's not quite love at first sight, but it's close:

CLAUDIO: O, my lord,
When you went onward on this ended action
I looked upon her with a soldier's eye,
That liked, but had a rougher task in hand
Than to drive liking to the name of love.
But now I am returned and that war thoughts
Have left their places vacant, in their rooms
Come thronging soft and delicate desires,
All prompting me how fair young Hero is,
Saying I liked her ere I went to wars.

As lightly as Claudio falls in love, he falls out: He is easily convinced by a scene contrived by Don Pedro's evil brother, Don John the Bastard, which makes Hero seem to be having an affair with another man. Claudio and Hero are dull people who fall in love dully; the stakes are low.

Much more interesting is the relationship between Hero's cousin Beatrice and Claudio's fellow soldier Benedick, who can best be described as "frenemies." Their battle of wits is longstanding:

BEATRICE: I wonder that you will still be talking, Signior Benedick, nobody marks you.

BENEDICK: What, my dear Lady Disdain! Are you yet living?

BEATRICE: Is it possible disdain should die while she hath such meet food to feed it as Signior Benedick? Courtesy itself must convert to disdain if you come into her presence.

But Beatrice and Benedick too--though they both declaim constantly against marriage--fall in love easily, when their friends contrive that they "overhear" accounts of how dearly each loves the other. This is sensible, not only because they clearly have a great affinity for each other behind their verbal sparring, but because Shakespeare subtly suggests that Benedick once jilted Beatrice. Still, if it were not for the machinations of Don John, love in this play would have very little to challenge it.

Don John's machination leads Claudio to cruelly denounce Hero on their wedding day, and then to one more contrivance: Hero and Leonato pretend that the grief has killed her, that Claudio might realize how much he truly loved her. Were it not for Beatrice, this might be a bland bit of Shakespearean silliness, but it casts a pall over her newly open love for Benedick:

BEATRICE: You have stayed me in a happy hour. I was about to protest I loved you.

BENEDICK: And do it with all thy heart.

BEATRICE: I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest.

BENEDICK: Come, bid me do anything for thee.

BEATRICE: Kill Claudio.

Benedick is little deeper than his wit, but Hero's "death" allows Beatrice to exhibit a latent fury we would not have expected, and duel with Claudio becomes a condition of her marriage with Benedick. For a moment, she seems horribly like a young Lady Macbeth:

O, that I were a man! What, bear her in hand until they come to take hands, and then, with public accusation, uncovered slander, unmitigated rancor--O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace.

This is as close as Much Ado About Nothing comes to losing its lightheartedness; Hero's ruse is exposed before the challenge can materialize. I admit that this is one of my chief disappointments with the play (the other being the weak comedy of the chief of the Watch, Dogberry, who is always using words incorrectly--ha!), that we are not permitted to witness the result of this challenge. That would have been a different play entirely, one in which love is far from nothing, but a powerful force of questionable value. As it is, the play ends with a double marriage and all forgiven, except for Don John, who disappears as neatly as all evil must in comedy, and the first recorded instance of this rom-com cliche:

BENEDICK: A miracle! Here's our own hands against our hearts. Come, I will have thee, but by this light I take thee for pity.

BEATRICE: I would not deny you, but by this good day, I yield upon great persuasion, and partly to save your life, for I was told you were in a consumption.

BENEDICK: Peace! I will stop your mouth.

They kiss.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice is probably the best example I’ve ever seen of the necessity of reading a book before making a judgment on it. Previous to this year, I’d thought of Pride and Prejudice as literature lite, frothy Victorian romance for silly little girls and silly older women—Twilight for people who don’t like vampires, basically. In my defense, it’s easy to get that impression. Every crappy romance novel written in the last 20 years claims Austen as an inspiration, not to mention that Jane Austen herself has become a posthumous cottage industry. In your average bookstore, you’ll find significantly more books about Austen or inspired by her work—including some dreadfully explicit Darcy/Bennet erotica—than you will novels by the woman herself. So when Christopher told me that Pride and Prejudice was one of his favorite books, I was intrigued.

And so, how was it? Safe to say, it was nothing at all like I expected. In fact, after reading it, it’s hard for me to imagine how the Austen-worshippers have gotten from the book what they’ve gotten. To judge from Pride and Prejudice, Austen would have mocked the culture her work has spawned. Not to mention that, although it’s certainly romantic—but never treacly—at points, to me, it reads more like a comedy.

For those who don’t know, the plot is thus: The Bennets are a moderately wealthy family, made up of r. Bennet, their easy-going and uninvolved father, Mrs. Bennet, who is completely crazy, and five daughters, Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Kitty, and Lydia. Elizabeth’s story gets the most ink now, but in the novel, both Jane’s and Lydia’s get nearly as much space in the book itself. There’s a lot to the plot and a large cast of characters, but considering the volumes that have been written already, I think I’ll focus on a couple things that stood out to me and leave the in-depth summaries to Wikipedia.

First, Pride and Prejudice is funny. Austen has a dry sense of humor, maybe too dry for a lot of modern readers (especially the kids who read it in school), but it’s hard to see how anyone could be unamused at the perpetually useless Mr. Collins, who, lacking in social graces, thinks the appropriate response to Lydia running off to elope with a less than pristine officer is the encourage her parents to disown her and to congratulate himself on not getting involved with Elizabeth, or this exchange, to which every comedy in the last 20 years owe royalties:

“Then it is as I always hoped,” cried Jane; “they are married!”
Elizabeth read on: “I have seen them both. They are not married,”

Jane’s hopeless optimism, Mary’s overwrought moralizing, and even Austen’s slow-burning disdain toward Mr. Bennet, who starts off with the reader’s sympathies but is eventually revealed to be passively complicit in his daughters’ situations. That’s not even to mention Mr. Darcy who spends approximately 2/3rds of the book acting like a major jerk. He insults Elizabeth at their first meeting, but is drawn to her when she rejects him. For her part, her interest perks up about the time she sees his beautiful estate. It makes a good point, one that romantic fiction rarely addresses: that frequently, the deepest affection can start in the shallowest of waters.

Secondly, Austen’s treatment of Lydia is interesting. Lydia elopes with the promiscuous Mr. Wickham, and upon her return home to see her family, we—and certainly the readers in Austen’s time—expect to find her cowed and realizing the error of her ways. Instead, she’s gleeful as a nymph, flitting around boasting about the wonderful man she’s landed. After that, we might expect some comeuppance, but even this doesn’t quite happen. True, when we last see her, we are told that her passion has cooled and that Wickham’s cooled long ago, and she is has little money or communion with her family, but is this really the most terrible thing? There is no cosmic consequence for her actions; she simply reaps more or less what you’d expect.

I guess what I’m saying is, read Pride and Prejudice. I’m glad I did.

Cheaper By the Dozen by Frank Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey

They had a dozen children, six boys and six girls, in 17 years. Somewhat to Dad’s disappointment, there were no twins or other multiple births. There was no doubt in his mind that the most efficient way to rear a large family would be to have one huge litter and get the whole business over with at one time.

First things first: this book has nothing in common with the 2003 movie starring Steve Martin except the title and the number of offspring in the featured family. Where the film was just a standard family comedy with a larger cast, the book is a genuinely sweet and funny look at an atypical family in the early part of the twentieth century. It’s also worth noting that this book doesn’t take much longer to read than the movie takes to watch.

Written by two of the dozen children, Cheaper By the Dozen is a memoir, basically a loosely-connected series of vignettes, mostly funny and occasionally moving. Although the title makes it sound like it focuses primarily on the children, the most vivid character in the story is actually Frank Galbrath, Sr., the father of the titular dozen. Both he and his wife Lillian are efficiency experts, making their living by showing companies and individuals how they can reduce “motion waste” and save time and money. They choose to apply these same principles to their family: irregular jobs are bid on by the children, with the job and the subsequent reward going to the lowest bidder; Morse code is taught by painting legends in every room of the house, and, similarly, foreign languages are taught by means of phonographs in every room.

Cheaper By the Dozen, like most funny books, doesn’t really benefit from a review. You can pick it up and read a couple pages and see if it’s for you. If you come from a family of thirteen, like me, it just might catch your attention.

Nice Work by David Lodge

He steps onto the bathroom scales. Ten stone two ounces. Quite enough for a man only five feet five and a half inches tall. Some say – Vic has overheard them saying it – that he tries to compensate for his short stature by aggressive manner. Well, let them.

She was born, and christened, Roberta Anne Penrose, in Melbourne, Australia, nearly thirty-three years ago, but left that country at five . . . growing up in a pleasant unostentatious house with a view of the sea.

What do you get when you put a self-made man and a trendy feminist teacher into a bag and shake? Nice Work. In this his thirteenth book, David Lodge, offers a bumpy and surprisingly funny comedy in which Vic Wilcox, the director of an engineering firm (with little regard for academics) and Robyn Penrose and leftist scholar collide in a government “shadow” program designed to foster mutual understanding between the “town and gown.” Lodge cleverly reveals both the foibles and fascinations of the factory and the ivory tower all in less than three hundred pages.

A Dog at Sea by J. F. Englert

Randolph is unusually smart. He is not just an intelligent dog, but is, in fact, smarter than many humans, including his owner Harry. The book begins with Harry and Randolph aboard the Nordic Bliss, a canine-friendly cruise headed to Curacao. Ostensibly, Harry and Randolph are on the cruise ship for some relaxation, but the real reason is that they think Curacao is where they will find Imogen. A few years back, Harry and Randolph watched Imogen leave the apartment for some bread, an errand from which she never returned. For a while Harry thought that she was dead, but Randolph had some lingering doubts. In A Dog About Town, Harry becomes convinced that Imogen is still alive, but in hiding for some reason. We find out that reason in A Dog Among Diplomats. In this third book, Randolph hopes to reunite with his mistress and put more of the mystery to rest. But before that can happen, he has to help get the bottom of a murder on board the ship.

The tale is told from Randolph's perspective. His murder-solving skills come from the ability to decipher complex human emotions through scent. In this way, Randolph can get a sense if someone is sad, if they are lying, or if they feel guilty. Randolph has to lead Harry along the way. All the while, Randolph never loses his canine attributes. Englert has a great grasp of canine behavior and a good understanding of what makes a good mystery. I absolutely love the Randolph series, and if you love dogs, mysteries, or good books, then you will too.

Homegrown Democrat by Garrison Keillor

I am a liberal and liberalism is the politics of kindness. Liberals stand for tolerance, magnanimity, community spirit, the defense of the weak against the powerful, love of learning, freedom of belief, art and poetry, city life, the very things that make America worth dying for.

The above quote perfectly sums up this book. Keillor, of Prairie Home Companion and Lake Wobegon fame, sets out to explain why he is a Democrat, by interweaving stories from his life and the history of the Democratic party. He writes about his parents and how the WPA helped them pull themselves up after the depression, his going to college on a government grant, and his encounters with average people in Minnesota.

The book amounts to nothing more than the ruminations of an old man, but the thing is this old man is a writer and a thinker. He is someone worth listening to. He has great thoughts about what it means to be a citizen of the United States and insights into the psyche of a Democrat. Keillor even attempts to figure out what goes on in the minds of Republicans, with comic effect. Keillor was raised in a religious home. This upbringing left an indelible mark on him, one that guides his actions and informs who is is to this day. This early imprint can be seen all throughout this book. And of course, Keillor's unmistakable wit is present, making Homegrown Democrat a thoroughly enjoyable read.

Homegrown Democrat is not a diatribe against the Republican party, although Keillor is never reluctant to take them to task. It is an impassioned celebration of old-time democratic (lowercase D) values.

Born Standing Up by Steve Martin

I talked to Brent a couple of days ago regarding this book. Because apparently neither of us had anything better to do in the middle of the afternoon on a Thursday. It told him that I didn't really agree with with his assessment of the book. We argued for a while, and then I hung up in a huff. It was very Hannity and Colmes.

Unlike Brent, I felt that Martin really gave the reader an inside look at his comedic process. The time that he spent at Knott's Berry Farm and Disneyland was an essential part of his comedic growth. It was while working in the cheap little magic shop at Disneyland that he first learned how to banter with an audience. The Bird Cage Theatre at Knott's gave him his first opportunity to perform consistently on a stage in front of any audience. These early experiences were seminal to the act that Martin created and honed in the years to come. He details his time as an opener for acts such as Sonny and Cher and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and he describes the lonely years spent on the road as a not-quite-famous headliner.

At one point, Martin cogently describes a watershed moment in his comedic thinking. "These notions stayed with me for months, until they formed an idea that revolutionized my comic direction: What if there were no punch lines? What if I created tension and never released it? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation. This type of laugh seemed stronger to me, as they would be laughing at something they chose, rather than being told exactly when to laugh."

Not only does Martin provide insights into his comedic thought processes, but he lets the reader in just a little on his personal life. Romantic trysts, long-term girlfriends, etc. He does remain rather mum about some aspects of his personal life, but this seems understandable.

Brent and I are on the same page when it comes to some of Martin's more recent films. If he wants to make the case that he stopped doing standup because he felt that his act was stale, that it was no longer original, then how does Martin justify making dreck like, Bringing Down the House, The Pink Panther, and Cheaper by the Dozen? Mr. Martin, if you're reading this, I loved Shopgirl, both the book and the film.

Born Standing Up was interesting and insightful. While it wasn't riotously funny, Martin's writing was clever. Quite often I found myself laughing out loud at his witty turns of phrase. And whenever Martin would quote from his act, it was always funny. Ultimately, I really enjoyed this book.

Mere Anarchy by Woody Allen

I decided to jump on the books by comedians wagon… I wish I had jumped onto it with a better book.

I adore Woody Allen. I like his ridiculous glasses, his sometimes too grandiose gesticulations, and his movies. I did not, however, like Mere Anarchy. It called seductively from the library bookshelf, misplaced beside a Post Secret collection. When brilliant men call you, you answer…On the rare occasion that this happens. I think that maybe Woody was calling to someone other than me, like the cute chick in the overstuffed arm chair near the section of books about Iraq and the war. They could have been more compatible.

When asked at my interview to write for The (Cr)Appalachian and was asked what I wanted to write on, I said I would be interested in doing book reviews on recent releases and dropped the name of Mere Anarchy, just knowing it would be fabulous before I even opened it.

I was so wrong. It’s a collection of short stories about everything obscure you could imagine, where someone who was clearly modeled after Allen himself is being subjected to numerous improbable situations that should be comical but aren’t. I’m not sure if the main character is always meant to be the same or not, but in most all of them, the character is called boychick, which for some reason seemed to get under my skin. The language employed was too hip, too forced, and too much after the first several stories. This might have been better as an audio book with everything read in his voice.

My honeymoon period with Allen is over. Or maybe I’m just jealous that the story about the New Age commune taught boychick, but not the reader, how to levitate.

Born Standing Up: A Memoir by Steve Martin

I've been psyched about this year's 50 Books Project ever since Carlton and I decided to see who could read the most books authored by comedians. Next in line for me: Too Jew For You: The Rob Schneider Story.

I read this book in two sittings at Books-A-Million, which should provide some amount of insight into the substance therein: mainly that there isn't much. The book is by Steve Martin, so I wasn't expecting the autobiography of Ghandi or anything, but what I was expecting was a well-written delving into the mechanics of stand-up. I've seen Seinfeld's documentary, Comedian, and I was expecting something more along those lines, insight into the trials and tribulations of an upcoming performer.

In actuality, the book is divided into two unequal sections, the first and larger half detailing Martin's beginnings at Knott's Berry Farm and Disneyland, with only small portions talking about his actual standup. The shortest sections of the book covers his meteoric rise to superstardom in the early 80s and it's the only section that consistently lets us into Martin's head.

The last section tells us how Martin abandoned standup (Answer: abruptly and completely) and why (He felt he'd peaked and had nothing new to offer). However, the book doesn't explain why Martin thought that doing The Pink Panther was a more artistically viable option than singing “King Tut” a few more times.

The memoir is very well-written and contains some interesting and funny bits, but I found it a little underwhelming. If you're interested in the inner workings of comedy, watch Comedian. If you're interested in Martin, watch The Three Amigos and listen to Wild and Crazy Guy. If you're interested in the rise of a supercomedian during the 70s and 80s, you'll probably enjoy it, but except for a few poignant moments near the end, it's nothing more than light reading.

I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This! by Bob Newhart

Bob Newhart is an incredibly funny person, not to mention successful. (Don’t know who he is? Check him out on IMDb.) His 1960 debut comedy album, The Button-Down Mind, sold more than a million copies, and supposedly outsold every album made by the Beatles in that decade. At that time there were a lot of guys still doing “take my wife, please” but Newhart and a group of younger comedians were carving out a niche as comedic storytellers. But even that fails to accurately describe Newhart’s act. He would present one side of a conversation, often on the phone. It may not sound all that funny, but it was…and is.

For example, in “The Submarine Commander” Newhart addresses the audience as if they were members of the crew, saying, “I’d like to congratulate you men on the teamwork we displayed. We cut a full two minutes off the previous record of four minutes and twenty-nine seconds in surfacing and firing at the target and resubmerging. I just want to congratulate you men on the team work. At the same time, I don’t want to in any way slight the men that we had to leave on deck. I think they had a lot to do with the two minutes we cut off the record, and I doubt if any of us will soon forget their somewhat stunned expressions as we watched them through the periscope.”

I don’t care who you are, that’s funny.

This book is essentially a memoir. Beginning with his early childhood, Newhart jumps around from one seminal event to the next, ending pretty much in the present. It was really interesting to see how long it took for Newhart to get his big break, and all the weird stuff he had to do to get by while waiting for this to happen. Newhart’s wry sense of humor comes through in the material, even when dealing with serious topics – which is not all that often.

I bought the paperback edition, so I was surprised at the number of simple typos, word omissions, and silly grammatical mistakes. It never ceases to amaze me how some things make it to press with so many basic errors. Some editor at Hyperion really dropped the ball. Besides these minor nuisances, the book was an enjoyable read, and often made me laugh out loud.

Newhart was the voice of Bernard in The Rescuers and The Rescuers Down Under. What more do you need to know? (That was a rhetorical question.)

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris

Hilarious. I liked this even more than Me Talk Pretty One Day. Sedaris' pours his dry, sarcastic sense of humor into every sentence of every story in this collection. He has a knack for storytelling as it is, but it doesn't hurt that his family - featured in most of the stories here - is a couple beers short of a six pack.

In this book, the stories range from childhood adventures to anecdotes from his life in rural France. My personal favorite is "Six to Eight Black Men." I don't know what else to say about this. If you haven't read/heard anything by this author, you need to. This is as good a starting point as any.

The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Holy Moses is this book long. I never knew that Douglas Adams wrote five books in the series, or that he started writing them at all in response to the popularity that the original radio show received. All five are organized pretty poorly, and Adams is quick to admit this in his introduction, pointing out which books contradict which other books and how often. The first one ends completely abruptly, and should have been merged with the second one, and the plots of the last three are so weak that I don't think he should have written them at all. Clearly they just rode in on the coattails of the first two, which, in turn, rode on the coattails of the radio show.

Adams is a good writer; he's witty and creative and can write a good story, as long as it doesn't run longer than about 50 pages. All of the books follow Arthur Dent, a kind of awkward antihero who's forced into circumstances that lead to his rescuing the earth, galaxy, or universe many times. Too many times. Adams' original plan was to write a series of short stories in which the earth is invariably destroyed at the end of each; it seems, from reading this book(s), that this would have suited his abilities better. The story becomes very episodic after the first book (in the first book, even), and characters turn into empty stereotypes of themselves just as quickly. Odd as it might seem, it gets a little tedious reading, once again, about some new, loopy plot to blot out the whole of existence.

The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is meant to be a satire of just about everything; he pokes fun at everything humans have ever done, partly by trivializing the Earth to something that needs to be demolished to build a hyperspace expressway. This book was fun to read, in bits and pieces, but it goes on for too long and runs out of steam fairly soon after it starts. I had always hesitated to read this book because I was worried that it was just a nerdy cult classic, full of inside jokes to print on T-shirts and sell at Hot Topic. But, then again, what did I expect from a British, science fiction, comedy novel?