Oh, smeg. NaNoWriMo is kicking my cotton-clad hindparts. 2000 words a day isn’t too bad if one keeps up, but flake a few days on account of relentless partying and tiens! how it creeps up! I need to write 5000 words by tonight, and it’s nearly 4PM.
On the bright side, by relentlessly churning out articles I’ve learned a lot. Adipositivity, for one thing, is very interesting; so is uncanny valley, Disneyland’s accommodation for autistic and gluten-free patrons (quite impressive, incidentally) and the health risks of pasteurised milk. And I’ll stand a bar of choccie for whoever can link those topics via Wikipedia articles in 50 steps or less.
My dear mama remains at large in England. Apart from a brief phone call shortly after her arrival I have not heard a peep, which leads me to conclude she misses me tremendously and is afraid to hear my sweet dulcet tones, lest they open the floodgates and cause her to come over all peculiar in the Bird and Baby. But today I got a pleasing card in the mail, indicating that she is still a) alive, b) kicking and c) having the jolliest of larks. Of course, that was a week ago now. She could be at the bottom of the Seine as I type. But we will dwell on cheerier matters. For instance: what is the funniest book you’ve ever read?
I’m torn on this myself. The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy would probably be the obvious pick, or 1066 And All That. But then I found Professor Branestawn high-larious as a youngster, and the Jennings books likewise - and while I don’t find them as funny now, I’m not sure HG2G and 1066 made my older self laugh as heartily as my younger self did with the aforementioned. But that could, of course, be due to my gradual shrivelling into a Scrooge-like, cynical shell of a woman.
On a related note, I am not a fan of Terry Pratchett. His parodies are laboured and overly in-jokey, making it very difficult to dive into a series without having already read several previous books (which is obviously unacceptable on the grounds of creating a universe-ripping time and causality paradox). I’ve read a half-dozen or so of his novels and tried gamely to find them funny, but… nope. Nothing. It’s like waiting for a sneeze that doesn’t come. PG Wodehouse on the other hand is corking, but doesn’t come into the running because I find his books witty rather than funny. What is the difference, I wonder? Some kind of viscerality to the humour, a response reached by the head rather than the gut? A “Heh!’ rather than a “Haw!”? A certain distancing from the humour, appreciating it rather than letting it sock you unawares? Three years, $12000 and a BA and we never covered this. Tsk.
Mother Says: