This is the part of the run-up to Christmas I always look forward to most – the ‘silly’ books, loo books, even non-books produced by serious publishers who may resent the huge piles of money they make every year while delicate, thoughtful literary novels remain unbought and unread. As it happens, I have just finished a wholly unsatisfactory book of short stories – no names, no packdrill – so a few weeks of loo books have proved surprisingly refreshing, like a palate cleanser after a hideously over-thought restaurant meal. They are all recommended for grumpy old relatives, or even yourself.
Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s Scream (Abacus, £14.99) comes in the familiar category of ‘Rants About Life’, and is full of gobbets of unadorned rage about features of modern living. ‘The disappointment of the takeaway’ is something we can all empathise with. Or:
The choice the computer gives you is ‘instal now’ or ‘instal later today’ or ‘remind me tomorrow’. You don’t want any of them. You’re happy with the status quo. The computer is probably too old to deal with the enforced change or update they are intending to inflict on it.
Or you are. Either may apply.
It’s a very bracing book, augmented by some pithy Nick Newman cartoons, and also given the unusual counterpoint of a few positive entries, which all appear in italics. There are some things, it turns out, the author actually likes: eating food at airports; and ‘the bliss of driving when Google Maps is telling you exactly what to do and which way to go’. And she adores ‘soft close’ kitchen drawers, which she says are ‘a wonder of the modern age’. Maxtone Graham is known for a number of entertaining books about the lives of women mainly before feminism, but I know from personal acquaintance that she is a very funny woman, and this is a very funny book.
Ruby Wax’s I’m Not as Well as I Thought I Was (Penguin, £10.99) came out last year in hardback and now appears in a natty paperback edition. I would never have imagined that a book about mental illness could be as laugh-out-loud funny as this, but Wax has clearly been through the mill, which she attributes to stern and demanding parents. She makes it clear that her career as a performer is just an abject attempt to gain attention from the wider public to make up for the lack of love she received as a child, and it sends her repeatedly to the local bin to try to sort herself out. There’s a space-filling parenthesis towards the end in which she goes off to make another documentary series about something or other, but at its heart this is an impressively candid and thoughtful book about how to confront the train wreck of your life. I have already given it to a couple of nutters (to use a technical term) in my friendship group.
Craig Brown’s A Voyage Around the Queen (Fourth Estate, £25) has already received a lengthy and enthusiastic review in these pages, but if only for sheer heft (657 pages) it merits a mention here too. Brown, as everyone says, has created an entirely new way of writing biographies about famous people which involves truffling out little known stories from the acres of printed work dedicated to them. While this isn’t as good a book as the Princess Margaret one, it’s strikingly absorbing and often very funny, as Brown can’t help being. But, like his Beatles book, it’s at least 150 pages too long: more judicious use of the red pen would have saved us all a lot of time we’re never going to get back.
Possibly the funniest book of the year is an extended rant on the unfairness of male pattern baldness
Trivia book of the year – always a hard-fought title – is Misc., by Rob Orchard, Christian Tate and Marcus Webb (Bloomsbury, £12.99). They are the founders of the magazine Delayed Gratification, the ‘Slow Journalism magazine that returns to big stories after the dust has settled to ask “What happened next?”’. Misc. is a miscellany in the hoary Ben Schott tradition but with far better entries than Schott’s beautifully designed but rather boring books. The authors report on the UK-wide Nigel shortage: in 1963 there were 5,529 newborn Nigels registered in England and Wales, whereas in 2022 there were none at all. There’s a list of the most popular airports (measured by footfall) that have been named after celebrities: John Wayne airport (in Santa Ana, California) continues to beat John Lennon airport (Liverpool) and George Best airport (Belfast) into a cocked hat, although Indira Gandhi (Delhi) remains the global champion. It’s all wonderfully entertaining and, if you set as many pub quizzes as I do, exceptionally useful.
But possibly the funniest book of the year came out some months ago: it’s Stuart Heritage’s Bald (Profile, £11.99), an extended rant on the terrible unfairness of male pattern baldness, and particularly how it has destroyed the life of one Stuart Heritage. It’s deranged, and priceless, whether you are as bald as a coot, moving in that direction or merely spending every waking minute worrying about going bald (that covers most men). Larry David thought the book was very funny indeed and, as so often, he’s spot on.
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