Five Books For Laughter, free edition

Starting the new year joyfully

The Laughing Cavalier by Frans Hals, 1624.

Happy new year and welcome to Five Books For, a newsletter for people who love great stories. I hope January has started gently for you and that you’re excited about a whole new year of reading ahead! I also hope you’re not feeling too much pressure to change things or make resolutions but if you are, then how about a fun one? I am reading War And Peace and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy with

Footnotes and Tangents

- it’s not too late to join us! The idea is to read one chapter of War & Peace a day, and the schedule for Wolf Hall is similarly leisurely so that we have time to soak it all in, enjoy it and discuss it with each other in the group.

Simon Haisell

sends out a weekly email recap email for both groups which is also a fantastic resource. Just click on any of those links to go through to the relevant groups and find out more.

In the northern hemisphere winter can sometimes feel bleak and bit unending once all the excitement of the holiday season is over (maybe not the best time for big changes?) although I must admit I relish the feeling of returning to normal and packing away the decorations ready to look ahead and get on with things.

Regardless of whether you’re in the middle of dark winter days or perhaps feeling a little deflated in a post-holiday slump, or even if you’re feeling full of January joy, here I offer you five books to make you laugh and bring a little more joy into the new year.

Let’s dive in!

My Roommate Is A Vampire by Jenna Levine

“He might be an undead creature of the night - but as undead creatures of the night went, he was a marshmallow.”

So what’s it about? Cassie Greenberg is a struggling artist who is barely making ends meet, working several jobs and facing eviction from her apartment when she sees an ad seeking a roommate in a very fancy neighbourhood for just $200 a month. Surely it’s too good to be true? When she visits the apartment, worrying that her potential new landlord could be a serial killer, she is immediately struck by both his beauty and his oddly old-fashioned language and manners. As they become friends and sparks start to fly, she realises he’s hiding something - but can her suspicions really be correct? And if he really is a vampire, can they ever be together?

What’s great about it? This is an utterly delightful, laugh-out-loud funny, light-hearted romcom with great characters. Frederick’s antiquated manners are both charming and comical without being ridiculous and his relationship with his best frenemy Reginald is very funny, especially when they interact by text. I do wish the fantasy elements had been expanded on a little more as I would have loved to understand more about how vampire magic in this universe works but it is a romcom rather than a fantasy series so I get that it’s a highlight rather than a main feature of the story. I agree withReading Under the Radar that the main conflict wraps up remarkably quickly and easily (especially given its severity - hello suburban vampire torture dungeon) but it doesn’t detract from how much fun the book is. Frederick is one of the most charming romcom leads I’ve read in a long time and his secret vampire talent is an absolute joy to discover as the novel progresses - I loved how Levine took a genre that’s so often dark and moody and made it joyful. Another satisfying aspect of the book is watching Cassie grow in self-confidence as she gradually wrestles her life into a shape she can be happy with. It’s also good to read a book set in a big city that isn’t New York or LA - the Chicago setting felt nicely realised without being too dominant.

Give it a try if: you like vampires; you like cosy fantasy; you like romcoms; you love books where the heroine follows a path to general fulfilment, not just romance; you love great male leads; you love exploring different cities in the books you read.

The Sunshine Cruise Company by John Niven

“Ethel wheeled for her very life, catching another downhill now, both of them really speeding up as, ahead, Ethel saw two escalators, both going down. She thundered towards the right-hand one and, in a display of skill that would surely have put her in the top-five wheelchair drivers worldwide, smashed her brakes on the moment she hit the metal, stopping on a dime, the escalator taking her gradually down.”

So what’s it about? Susan and Julie have been best friends since they were young. Now, as they approach their sixties, their lives are about to take an unexpected turn. Julie has always struggled financially but when Susan’s husband dies in a sex dungeon accident, she finds out that his illicit sex life isn’t the only secret he’s been keeping - his financial escapades have left her with nothing. Less than nothing, in fact, as the bank is going to need to take everything she has left. Unless, perhaps, Susan and Julie take what the bank has first. With the help of an octogenarian gangster called Nails and the even older Ethel, a wheelchair-driving resident of the facility where Julie works, they decide to rob the bank - but can this unlikely gang of bank robbers pull off a heist?

What’s great about it? The friendship between Susan and Julie is heartwarming and the dynamics between the gang are very well-drawn. The cast of characters is brilliant, Ethel perhaps most of all - she is just so much fun and full of surprises. The book has both a very British sense of humour and a more general British sensibility so if you are an Anglophile it should be very appealing. There are bumbling coppers and the scenes where the police miss the clues by mere inches are some of the most comical in the book. The heist aspect gives the plot some thrills and momentum. It is also unashamedly rude - I had forgotten quite how rude until I revisited it for this newsletter but it’s very sweary and has quite a lot of bodily/physical humour but it works well and doesn’t feel gratuitous, and it’s not the only type of humour in the book.

Give it a try if: you like wheelchair chase action sequences; you find British humour funny; you don’t mind graphic sexual and scatological humour; you like (a lot of) swearing; you love stories about older characters; you love stories with happy endings; you love a good heist story; you love stories about people triumphing in difficult circumstances; you love stories about friendship.

My Not-So-Perfect Life by Sophie Kinsella

“It’s amazing how an otherwise intelligent person can become a credulous fool as soon as you mention the words “organic,” “authentic,” and “Gwyneth Paltrow.””

So what’s it about? Katie Brenner has moved away from her family farm in Somerset to pursue her dream of a successful marketing career in London, only to find that everything is harder than she’d hoped it would be: the room she rents in her shared flat is too small even for a wardrobe, her commute is a nightmare, her salary is so low she can barely make ends meet and the office politics at her agency are weird. However, she’s sure it’s only a matter of time until her glamorous boss Demeter, who has the kind of perfect, glossy life Katie aspires to have one day, notices her work and plucks her from obscurity to give her greater responsibility. Until one day, Demeter fires her and Katie finds herself back in Somerset helping her parents launch their new glamping business.

When Demeter unexpectedly turns up as a guest, Katie sees a chance to get even… but once she sees Demeter’s real life, will she still want to? And what exactly has been going on at the office since Katie has been gone?

What’s great about it? As always with a Kinsella novel, you’re guaranteed plenty of laugh out loud moments as well as some romance and redemption as the characters learn what’s really important to them. This book is no exception and Katie is a character who I think lots of people will relate to - she shares snippets of her life on social media which aren’t exactly outright lies but definitely give a misleading impression, and a core theme of the book is the way we judge the surface of other people's lives (especially through social media, but also people we know in real life) without having any idea of what’s going on underneath. Seeing Katie’s determination to build the life that she wants for herself despite the various obstacles in her way, and having to make some hard moral choices, gives the book a solid centre to ground the comedy aspects, some of which are an astute skewering of wellness culture. I love how Kinsella writes families as well as romance and that her heroines are never too perfect but rather very relatable: I think she has a real gift for characterisation.

Give it a try if: you have ever compared yourself to someone else online; you like stories with determined heroines; you loved The Office; you like books with low-stakes moral quandaries and revenge plots; you like a romance plot line which doesn’t dominate the book.

Texts From Jane Eyre by Daniel Mallory Ortberg

“I WOULD BREATHE FOR YOU MY JANE
JANE WHERE HAVE YOU GONE
I AM BEREFT WITHOUT MY JANE
I SHALL SINK INTO ROGUERY”

So what’s it about? Have you ever wondered what Mr. Rochester of Jane Eyre, Mrs. Bennett of Pride & Prejudice, Achilles or Sherlock Holmes might text if they had access to a mobile phone? Well, wonder no more, because Ortberg has helpfully created an entire book filled with the texts from these and various other characters which will make you cackle with laughter.

What’s great about it? This is a great book for dipping in and out of and it ranges from The Iliad all the way through to Harry Potter so there’s something in there for every reader, although it does lean a little more towards characters from the classics. Chapters are only a page or two long and it’s very witty, consisting entirely of text conversations between characters from your favourite books in history.

Give it a try if: you like short form humour articles; literary references; classics; unusual or quirky books; books which are easy to pick up and put down.

Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser

“This myth called bravery, which is half-panic, half-lunacy (in my case, all panic), pays for all; in England you can’t be a hero and bad. There’s practically a law against it.”

So what’s it about? Harry Flashman, our titular anti-hero, is regarded as a military hero in Victorian England - a brave and skilled fighter who is trusted with the most dangerous of missions. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth: as he shares here in his private papers, he is in fact an utter coward, devoid of any moral compass, whose only skills lie in languages, horsemanship and fornication, and possibly also in toadying up to those above his station.

In this first book of the series we meet him at the beginning of his career. After being expelled from school and coerced into a shotgun wedding, forcing him to leave his fashionable regiment behind, Flashman finds himself in India and then Afghanistan, where disaster awaits as the diplomatic situation is rapidly deteriorating. Despite his best attempts to avoid any kind of bravery or fighting, including literally running away in the opposite direction, Flashman inevitably finds himself at the centre of things, and eventually coming out on top.

What’s great about it? Flashman is surely one of the great anti-heroes of fiction. His self-awareness and lack of shame despite his awful character makes him, for all his flaws, very appealing to read about and the books are filled with comic moments. These are tremendously fun books, written with tongue firmly in cheek. If you enjoy historical fiction of the adventure type but want something a bit lighter then this would be a perfect read. I also like that the character has a history; he first appeared in the 1857 book Tom Brown’s School Days as the cruel school bully. I love that MacDonald Fraser took a character from a much older book and gave him a whole new life, in keeping with his original depiction but deepened and rounded out (and of course, much funnier). The conceit is that each of the books in the series is supposedly lifted directly from Flashman’s personal papers which, we see in a fictional foreword, have been found after his death. I love how much thought has gone into all of this and the alternative view of history which the series provides - when we read historical fiction, especially in the military sphere, it’s very rare that we read anything that’s both humorous and unheroic.

Give it a try if: you love an anti-hero; you’ve ever wondered what it’s like for the people at the battle who are petrified; you love an adventure story; you like historical fiction.

Thanks for reading!

I hope you’ve found something here to add to your reading list and that it brings you some joy. I’d love to hear which books you’ve read which have made you laugh, or which authors you find the funniest? As always, please reply and let me know. I love hearing from you.

Remember, paid subscribers get a second newsletter later in the month with an additional recommendation (sometimes more), access to that month’s themed poem and playlist, as well as the ability to comment on posts and chat to other readers in the comments and various other goodies. If you’d like to upgrade your subscription for just €5 each month/€50 each year, you can click the button below. Regardless of your subscription type, I’m so glad you’re here. Join me next month for five new recommendations on a very different theme!

Happy reading,

Kate