Degrees of Affection

I learned about this from Bibliophage's post and thought, I had to do this. I don't do twitter at all, so I thought I'd do each of these as a post during the month of July. I hope I can get these up once a day...but I make no promises!

At first, I wasn't sure I'd be able to scrounge even one book for this first day's post...mostly because I couldn't remember the last book that made me actually laugh out loud. But then I remembered a couple books that show the funny side of two of my favorite genres...and now I can't stop remembering books! Isn't that always the way.

Dave Barry Slept Here - My then future husband introduced me to this book and I couldn't put it down. While the facts he includes might not often be technically true, they are often scarily accurate when looking at the bigger picture surrounding these events. I found myself nodding as much as I was laughing. And laugh I did. I will not read this book in public because I can't stop peals of laughter at his unique dating system (everything happened on October 8th - easier to remember that way), his asides that don't seem to go anywhere but you can't help but laugh, and his lampooning of the textbooks I grew up with where a small section of each chapter was given over to "the many and important contributions by women and minorities." In the textbooks, this would be a paragraph clumsily stuck on, completely kept apart from the rest of the text; in Barry's book, that is literally what he says every time he 'thinks' they've reached the percentage where this needs to be added. It's funny, but it also made me appreciate the textbook I got in college that accomplished this without making itself obvious or actually making the situation worse.

Ouran High School Host Club Vol 1 - I've read a fair bit of manga and watched quite a few anime series, so something I really like to see is a series that takes the cliches and tropes and satirizes them. Ouran Host Club does this wonderfully. I don't recommend reading it unless you've read at least some manga, as much of the humor will simply not make sense. This particularly series holds up the almost ironclad rules of girl manga up for laughs, with the "reverse harem" (one girl and several guys in a group) pointed out by a very young shoujo reader, the archetypes each person plays to a tee and yet somehow manages to be able to be appreciated in their own right, and the crazy hijinks that often occur in this type of manga. The anime plays this up even more, with even more humorous results.

Tomorrow is: Favorite SF/Fantasy Novel for World UFO Day!