Yes, we love our books that have serious subjects, subjects that make you think and maybe even change who you are.

Philosophy, post-colonial themes, we love it all but how we love to laugh out loud too! Is there anything more heartwarming than seeing a reader laughing out loud while reading?

 

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The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize is the only literary award for comic literature in the United Kingdom and this year, Edward St. Aubyn’s new novel Lost For Words, a satire of literary prizes, took the prize.

It is good to see a prize that has a sense of humor and that literature does not always have to be so serous and stiff.

Read an EXCERPT of Lost for Words:

When that Cold War relic Sir David Hampshire had approached him about becoming Chair of the Elysian Prize committee, Malcolm Craig asked for twenty-four hours to consider the offer. He had a visceral dislike of Hampshire, the epitome of a public-school mandarin, who had still been Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office when Malcolm was a new Member of Parliament. After he retired, Hampshire took on the usual bushel of non-executive directorships that were handed out to people of his kind, including a position on the board of the Elysian Group, where he had somehow fallen into the role of selecting the committees for their literary prize. His breadth of experience and range of contacts were always cited as the justification, but the truth was that David liked power of any sort; the power of influence, the power of money and the power of patronage.

Malcolm’s doubts were not confined to Hampshire. Elysian was a highly innovative but controversial agricultural company. It numbered among its products some of the world’s most radical herbicides and pesticides, and was a leader in the field of genetically modified crops, crossing wheat with Arctic cod to make it frost resistant, or lemons with bullet ants to give them extra zest. Their Giraffe carrots had been a great help to the busy housewife, freeing her to peel a single carrot for Sunday lunch instead of a whole bunch or bag.

Click HERE to read more.

 

 

Image by Eli Stein who also loved P.G Wodehouse. Check out his cartoons here