Thursday, July 30, 2009

Booking Through Thursday

I've been getting a few ideas (thanks to Rebecca) about some ways other bloggers blog through the week. I'll be trying some of them.

Booking through Thursday: This Thursday's idea is "what's the funniest book you've read recently"?
Mainly I read urban fantasy, and they usually aren't full of comedic moments; although some will bring chuckles out of me.

The book that made me laugh the most while I was reading it wasn't even an adult read. It was a book by Jim Benson in the Dear Dumb Diary series. This guy writes exactly like a slightly sarcastic girl in 6th or 7th grade. The evening I was reading it, I was relaxing on my bed, the rest of the family was in the other room, and I just kept laughing out loud-not chuckling, full out laughter. This is part of a series of books written in diary style (started a few years before the Diary of a Wimpy Kid came out). The diary writer is a girl, who draws diagrams and pictures with captions in her diary entries to help make her points. Funny- After I read this one, I bought the others for the afterschool program I run.

Wee Free Men, YA

For YA and adult books, Terry Pratchett writes a series of books that take place in the discworld. These are all funny, but with a quieter humor. I especially like the tongue-in-cheek footnotes that are scattered through out his books. The book that has made me laugh the most is Wee Free Men. The latest book that made me laugh hard from the discworld series is Making Money - a satire that takes on the banking system and federal reserves. Funny stuff.
There are more than 30 books in the discworld series, including the YA books. It never gets old, because Mr Pratchett does not write about the same characters in every book. Although some of the characters make an appearance in many of the books, depending on what area of the discworld the book is set in. This keeps it fresh. The only thing that I ever hear repeated is the information about the discworld (it's flat) and how it rests on the back of four elephants, who stand on the back of a giant turtle that swims through space. There's more to it, but that's the basics. Each novel could be read out of order, without feeling like you don't know what's going on, but once I read one of these, I had to find them all, and keep buying them.

3 comments:

  1. Terry Pratchett has been recommended to me before but I have yet to pick up one of his books. I will have to put it on my list so when I finish the reading I have going on now, I can remember to read it!

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  2. He's good. All of his books take on a segment of society; such as communications, banking, the post office, the newspaper trade, vampires, different religions, witchcraft - nothing escapes him. Interesting world.

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  3. I've never read any Pratchett either, but perhaps I should pick him up :)

    Here is my Booking Through Thursday response.

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