Traversing Literature: From Amusingly Overrated to LOL to Laughable

Election Special: The New York Times recently asked the all-important question: What is the most "lol" novel of all time? The editors of the Book Review section named their top vote-getter: Lucky Jim.

Said editors clearly have egg white in their veins. Kingsley Amis’s satire of neurotic intellectuals and English academic life is the funniest novel EVER? [Amis, below.] Heck, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a better comic novel than Lucky Jim, and it's NOT a comic novel! Still, it certainly made me laugh... when I wasn’t cringing or reaching for my Spanish dictionary. (And off the top of my head, both Motherless Brooklyn and Catch-22 are much funnier than Lucky Jim.)

Writing in the Guardian, Diane Shipley noted the dearth of recognition in the Times for funny female authors. Shipley’s list of possibilities (Nancy Mitford, Jane Austen [above], Marian Keyes) left out Dorothy Parker, but then Parker's longer works were less well known than her withering one-liners and morbid poems. Examples?

Regarding a book she had not enjoyed, Parker wrote, “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” And as to poetry:

It costs me never a stab nor squirm/To tread by chance upon a worm./“Aha, my little dear,” I say,/“Your clan will pay me back some day.”

Wait, I know what woman author is the funniest: Ayn Rand! I’ll never forget my astonishment at reading the much bally-hooed tandem of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. But I guess that "lol" and "laughable" aren’t really the same thing, are they?

Last Thing: Hmm, I thought this entry would somehow turn into an "election special," but it has failed to do so. :)

While You're Thinking About That, Think About This

Mr. Bookman, the library cop, was one of my favorite characters from Seinfeld. As played by Philip Baker Hall, Mr. Bookman had a clipped, Joe Friday-esque delivery that was comic gold.


The following dialogue concerning Jerry Seinfeld's overdue (by 20 years!) copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer still makes me smile.

Bookman: You took this book out in 1971.
Seinfeld: Yes, and I returned it in 1971.
Bookman: Yeah, '71… Bad year for libraries. Bad year for America. Hippies burning library cards, Abby Hoffman telling everybody to steal books. I don’t judge a man by the length of his hair or the kind of music he listens to. Rock was never my bag. [jabbing his finger at Jerry] But you put on a pair of shoes when you walk into the New York Public Library, fella!

Think it's a joke? Think again, fella. Heidi Dalibor of Grafton, Wisconsin, was arrested earlier this month after failing to return two library books. And she was only one year overdue!

But hey, Dalibor was almost asking for trouble. She received four library letters, two phone calls, two official notices, one citation from the police, and a court appearance notice. But she ignored them all.

What was Dalibor thinking? “I said, ‘What could they possibly do? They can’t arrest me for this.’ I was wrong.”

Her wrong-ness and sunny personality led to a strangely cheerful mug shot. To her credit, Dalibor was cool about her overdue infamy. She paid her $170 fine and told reporters, “I completely take responsibility for not paying my fine on time and not going to my court date.”

Good on her. Still, Dalibor isn’t planning on returning the books. Hey, she's paid for them now.

As for the two books that caused all this trouble, they were Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons and Janet Fitch’s White Oleander. Hmmm. If you had to go to jail to read a book (or two), what titles would be worthy? (David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn came to mind for me.)

While you're thinking about that, here's a Bookman clip: