John Self
Book botherer
- Suggestions please for books for Tadpole Self (13), who, having moved on from Wimpy Kid &c, finds little to please him in the earnest, issue-led teen/YA bookshop shelves. He likes funny books. Currently reading Adrian Mole. Didn't like Pratchett. Trying H2G2 next. But there must be some modern ones!
- Conclusion from the replies: there aren't really many. A gap in the market! But then Adrian Mole and Hitchhikers weren't YA or aimed at kids, so maybe (as several have suggested) I should just try him on grown-up comic fiction.
- Wonderful. Google is just so desperate that I use Gemini, a tool I have no use for
- Love the footnote too.
- My favourite cartoon of the year so far
- Whenever I have to succinctly describe an historical event or character in a TV/music review I'm always reminded of the inexplicably revered Nick Kent rock memoir, Apathy For The Devil in which he wrote that Geoffrey Chaucer was “rightly renowned as one of England’s first book-writers”.
- One boggling bit of overwriting that always stood out for me was Vincent LoBrutto on Christiane Kubrick painting: "Jam sandwiches, a favorite snack, were fixtures in the studio. Christiane munched on the preserves spread onto bread for sustenance while contemplating a work in progress."
- This in turn reminds me of a description I read in a review - I think - in Q magazine in the 1990s of an American book about the Beatles, which glossed "toast" as "a Liverpool snack made of cooked bread". It's so good I wonder now if it was a joke, but I don't remember it being presented that way.
- Has anyone done a watercolour of Paddington leading the Sycamore Gap tree away yet?
