At this stressful time of year, it is important to note the distinction between Christmas ‘funny’ books and Christmas ‘quirky’ books. Funnies we know only too well, mainly from the sinking feeling most of us experience when unwrapping one on Christmas morning. Quirkies are a more recent development, trading less on jokes and merriment than on oddness, silly facts, curious stories and generalised eccentricity. ‘That’s not writing, that’s typing,’ said Truman Capote of Jack Kerouac. Many of these books are just downloading. But a few are worth your while.
The latest from the all-conquering QI franchise is The Second Book of General Ignorance by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson (Faber, £12.99). The first one, published in 2006, was translated into 26 languages and sold 1.2 million copies, figures to make other authors of Christmas books weep into their tea and contemplate a swift end. This follow-up uses the same basic approach: apparently sensible questions are asked (What colour are oranges? How far are you from a rat?) only for the widely known ‘right’ answer to be cut down with a scythe and traduced as bilge and poppycock. Oranges aren’t orange, they are green (except when they aren’t of course). The notion that ‘you are never more than six feet from a rat’ is swiftly dispatched: a city dweller is more likely to be about 70 feet away.
There’s a smugness about all this that can set the teeth on edge, and several of these exploding ‘facts’ rely on pernicketiness almost beyond the powers of human perception. For instance, what is the second highest peak in the world? K2, maybe? Sorry, that’s only the second highest mountain in the world. The second highest peak is the south peak of Everest. If someone asked this in a pub quiz, people would be waiting outside afterwards with knives. And yet the sheer range and depth of QI’s research consistently turns up marvellous nuggets of information. Lloyd and Mitchinson’s book is infuriating but brilliant. I wonder which of those two words they will use for the paperback.
Simple Pleasures: Little Things That Make Life Worthwhile (National Trust, £7.99) is a more calming alternative. Editor Ivo Dawnay (a name so quintessentially National Trust you suspect it is made up) has asked writers and a few celebrities to supply brief essays (probably for free) on simple things they really like. So we have Ann Widdecombe admiring her roaring log fire, Valerie Grove picking up litter, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne preferring conversation to discussion, Mary Killen cleaning her cottage and Alain de Botton taking his enormous dome of a head around a zoo, and frightening some of the more nervous inmates there. This is a small and almost completely inconsequential book, but it’s also charming and strangely browseable, and probably best consumed with another simple pleasure, an enormous glass of red wine.
Some publishers are looking to the past for their quirkies. The First English Dictionary of Slang 1699 (Bodleian Library, £12.99) is a reprint of a guide originally compiled for the polite London classes, should they be unlucky or foolish enough to wander through the ‘wrong’ side of town. Dandyprat was ‘a little puny Fellow’, Slubber-degullion ‘a slovenly, dirty, nasty Fellow’, and Grumbletonians were ‘Malecontents, out of Humour with the Government, for want of a Place, or having lost one.’ Everyone needs a good dictionary in the loo, and this could be it. Trollop is ‘a lusty coarse Ramp or Tomrig’. It’s poetry, of a sort.
The Pocket Enquire Within (Random House, £12.99) is subtitled ‘A Guide to the Niceties and Necessities of Victorian Domestic Life’, dates from 1856, and is packed with valuable advice. ‘Reading in bed at night should be avoided, as, besides the danger of an accident, it never fails to injure the eyes.’ You will also learn how to protect dahlias from earwigs, use gutta percha to fill a decayed tooth, and combine diluted sulphuric acid, tincture of myrrh and spring water to produce a substance that can whiten your fingernails, very possibly down to the bone.
The last two are of more specific appeal. Lambert’s Railway Miscellany (Ebury Press, £12.99) is an enjoyable ragbag of stories and anecdotes aimed very clearly at men of a certain age whose yearning desire to drive steam trains has never left them. Anthony Lambert tries to keep it as untechnical as possible to attract a general audience that probably doesn’t exist.
And in aaaaw to zzzzzd (MIT Press, £9.95), John Bevis offers you something you never knew you needed, but now can never be without: a lexicon of the words of birds. ‘Karrk-karrk’ may be a pheasant, but ‘karrr’ is probably a reed warbler, ‘kar-r-r’ a red-breasted merganser and ‘kar-wic’ a grey partridge. Bevis, who may be certifiable, has usefully separated the birds of North America and the birds of Europe into different sections. Presumably he is now in the Amazon jungle, working on volume two.
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