My favorite line?  ”Is that your blood?”  ”Oh . . . yes, some of it.”

I feel fairly certain Jane would have loved this.

On the other hand, he brought this clip to my attention.  Admittedly it’s about writing, not about bookstores, but I defy you not to laugh.  Watch it two or three times.  I’ve seen it like ten times and it still cracks me up.

It speaks to a basic human truth: we’re all working on our novels, aren’t we?

Note: I can’t get it to embed–rats.  I’ll keep working on it, but until then, click on this link if you want a smile to send you happily off into what I hope is a wonderful summer weekend!

Wait, maybe this will work (thanks, Kim).

Seriously, people’s tastes are so drastically different you have to know your audience.  My father told me to read Elegance of the Hedgehog because he loved it, so I borrowed Kim’s copy.  When I returned it to her, admitting I had given up halfway through because it was so much NOT my kind of book, she laughed and said, “You’ll notice I didn’t tell you you should read it.  I didn’t think you’d like it.”  Kim knows me well enough to know what to recommend to me–and what not.  For instance, every good friend or relative of mine knows never to tell me to read a book where a child gets bullied or abused in any way, because I won’t sleep for a month, and I’ll blame them.

And I know Kim doesn’t share my love for graphic novels or fantasy, so I wouldn’t go around telling her to read any of my favorites, although I will rush to tell my sister or my oldest son about any new good one, since they love that stuff too.

But I’m reading a book right now that I think anyone who’s into books at all would enjoy.  It’s funny, for one thing–and who among us can’t use a good laugh right around now?  Can’t think of a soul–but even more importantly, it has insights about publishing and book-writing that are so unbelievably on target, it’s basically a primer in how to write and sell books.

The book is How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely.  (Full disclosure: my husband’s met Hely a few times and they have some mutual friends, which is why he read the book in the first place and passed it on to me.  But I’ve never even met the guy and, sadly, I don’t get any commission or recognition for recommending his book.  Of course, if Steve reads this post and wants to send me a muffin basket, I’ll be all “STEVE!  BUDDY!” so I hope someone sends it on to him and he feels inspired . . .)

Most of this book is laugh out loud funny–when Rob was lying on the bed, reading the book to himself, I got annoyed at how often he’d chortle.  I think that’s rude if no one else can share the joke, don’t you?  (Note: it isn’t rude when I do it.)  Pete, the protagonist, is stuck in a dead-end job, but when his former girlfriend invites him to her wedding, he realizes he needs to become a success before then.  He decides he’ll write a best-selling book and sets about figuring a formula that will work for him.

And that’s the part I love: he breaks down the different genres and gives you sample pages from various authors (yes, they’re fictional, and, yes, you will be able to tell almost immediately which real-life bestselling author they’re based on).  He even offers up a mock New York Times bestsellers list with book titles that are so close to the real thing, I was tempted to try a few of them on my agent and editors.

The book wouldn’t work if it were too broad, if Pete’s ideas were silly and implausible.  No, they’re silly and very, very plausible.  And the “excerpts” from various different writers’ works are dead-on accurate, which makes you wonder how hard it really is to do what Dan Brown does, especially when Hely’s outline of a published book called The Darwin Enigma offers up about as convincing a storyline as anything Brown writes.

As the main character breaks down–scientifically–what you need to include to have a bestseller, you realize how most bestsellers today really have fallen into a genre-trap and can easily be quantified.  Pete does pay a visit to some “serious” writers, who are teaching or getting their masters at a place that sounds a lot like Iowa and reading their overly detailed and gently nuanced stories to one another.  Hely does a pretty good job of capturing that world, too (and the kind of writing it encourages).  As he points out, why bother with that when you can just hammer out a bestseller?  He’s not actually contemptuous of these people, though: Pete comes away with a vague sense that maybe they’re trying to do something more honest and less cynical than what he’s doing.

Hely does an amazing job of dissecting the story and creative elements of successful detective novels, thrillers, memoirs, and philosophical ruminations along the lines of a Life of Pi kind of thing.

In Hely’s book, book editors have no idea what they’re doing and spend their lives terrified they’ll reject the one book that will go on to be a bestseller for someone else.  Success is dependent on luck, and when his own book starts to pick up steam, it’s for no merit of its own, but some weird confluence of events that brings it unexpected attention.  We should all be so lucky.

Anyway, my point is: this book is brilliantly accurate.  So much so that as I read it, I kept saying, “Actually, that’s a really good idea.  That’s a great title.  Wow, I’d watch a movie with that scene” (Oh, yeah, Pete also has a stint in Hollywood, meeting with a brilliant, crazy screenwriter who’s got a movie about chess and Russian mobsters that I swear could get greenlighted tomorrow if someone pitched it for real).

Let me leave you with one example from Hely’s New York Times bestseller list parody:

“EXPENSE THE BURBERRY, by Eve Smoot (Simon & Schuster, $23.95.)  A young woman in Manhattan spends her days testing luxury goods and her nights partying and complaining.”

Expense the Burberry.  Why oh why didn’t I think of that title first?  There’s bestselling gold in this book.  Too bad Hely’s only interested in satire.

It’s not easy for a book to make me laugh out loud.  Usually when I’m reading a “funny” book I note in my head “this part is the funny part,”  occasionally I smirk, and every now and then I chuckle.  I can count how many times a book has made me laugh out loud.  Annie Lamont has a scene about going to the beach with thin teenagers and how her thighs feel so large she names them.  I could hardly breathe I laughed so hard.  I love listening to David Sedaris, when he’s reading I’ve had to pull over so I don’t get in a car accident.  But when I read him, not so much.  By the fifth page of So You Want to be President? I was laughing out loud.

This book is the civics class you wish you had; however, it’s rated upper PG-13 or lower R, so probably there’s a problem assigning it in school.  The first section of the book tests whether or not the reader is a Democrat or Republican.  These tests always worry me, what if I’m secretly not a believer in the party I love?  No worries, I landed safely in the score range of where I belong, centrist Democrat (and so did Richard Nixon and Al Gore, interesting combination).  The balance of the first half of the book explains the primary process and included quizzes the answers of which are awarded delegate points.  It takes about 1,500 delegates to win the party nomination, I had 165.  Clearly, presidential politics will not be my next career.

The second half of the book discusses the general election.  The very catchy chapter titles give a sense of the topics:  “I Now Declare You Running Mates,” “I Can Name That Blowhard In Three . . . No, Two Phrases,” (I think Ann Coulter’s role is to make Democrats really re-think their commitment to free speech), and my favorite “The Dirt Of Your Enemy Is My Victory Soap.”  Always humorous and sparing no one, the book looks at polling, religion, knowledge of foreign countries (little required) and the Constitution (if you’re ignorant of it, you can claim you didn’t know you were trashing it).

Anyone who has a passing interaction with news knows that we have a rough time ahead of us, but we have a moment, as a nation, to celebrate something truly wonderful on Tuesday.  The collective joy welcoming Mr. Obama feels historic, it’s a moment I want to join in and experience.  The Obama team is trying to allow everyone to participate in this Inauguration with televised concerts, events across the nation (check out the Stories event in Los Angeles and Joseph-Beth Booksellers Inauguration Ball in Cleveland, OH) and service projects to enable all of us to help one another.

So, read something funny and humorous, join hands with your community in service on Monday and then again in celebration on Tuesday.  We’ll all get back to work on Wednesday with a fresh spirit and a stronger connection.

You may or may not know that my husband is a co-executive producer on the  long-running prime time animated show “The Simpsons.”   It’s a pretty well-regarded show (to judge by the Emmys he’s accrued since working on it), so when Kim and I were brainstorming about possible “best of” lists, I thought it was worth asking Rob if he were willing to survey the Simpsons writers on their favorite humorous books.

The answer was, “Probably not.”

I’m not that easily dissuaded, except when it comes to something important, so I pressed a little harder, telling him that ALL he had to do was say, “Hey, what’s everyone’s favorite funny book?”  He reluctantly agreed to do that much, but warned me that if the other writers regarded it as “more work,” he was dropping the whole thing.

Rob came home that night with dozens of handwritten titles nominated by the writers in the room–and a confession that the discussion had been kind of fun for everyone.

So here’s a list of the funniest books some of the funniest TV writers in America have come up with, somewhat winnowed down and edited by ME, because I’m the one writing the post and a little bit by Rob, too, because he came and looked over my shoulder.  (The ones I don’t have much to say about were the ones Rob said I had to include even though I hadn’t read them, so the less I have to say, the more you can assume the book is terrifically funny.)

1.  Flashman (the whole series) by George MacDonald Fraser.  An unrepentant cheat, liar, braggart and womanizer, Flashman was a minor character in Tom Brown’s Schooldays until Fraser decided the school bully should have his own series. 

2.  How I Conquered Your Planet by John Swartzwelder.  Written by a truly legendary former Simpsons writer (I believe he wrote 53 episodes), this book is just, well, funny.

3.  Our Dumb Century or any other Onion collection.  If your giftee likes humor, he probably knows The Onion, the brilliant fake newspaper.  The collections are staggeringly funny and superb bathroom reading.

4.  Pastoralia by George Saunders.  I haven’t read this one and they didn’t give me any blurbs, but apparently there was a lot of enthusiasm for this one, so I say get it.

5.  Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov.  I handpicked this one from the list I was given because it’s one of my all-time favorite books.  It’s a bit like a placebo: if you can trick yourself into reading it as a serious book, then it’s that much more incredible when you start realizing what’s going on.  A brilliant, brilliant book and the best example of an unreliable narrator you’re ever going to find.

6.  Anything by PG Wodehouse.  Actually, it was specifically the novel P. Smith, Journalist, but since that one may be out of print (and I’ve never read it), I expanded this one to all things Wodehouse.  Yes, I know, he wrote a long time ago, but he’s really really genuinely funny.

7.  Without Feathers, by Woody Allen.  There are books that made me want to be a writer, but this is the book that made me want to be funny.   And even when Allen makes movies like The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, I forgive him because he wrote Without Feathers.

8.  The Magic Christian and/or Candy by Terry Southern.  You know when you first start dating and you’re madly in love and you want your new crush to love everything you love so you give him/her your favorite book to read?  Rob gave me Magic Christian way back when.  And we’ve been together for over 20 years so . . . you know.  It’s good.   I also love Candy, which is Southern’s crazy raunchy take on Candide but it’s definitely not for the kiddies.

9.  Quin’s Shanghai Circus, by Edward Whittemore.  Now I wish I had asked more questions because I know nothing about this book.  Maybe someone will write in with more info about it?  It’s got to be good to make it on the list, right?

10. The Ginger Man by JP Donleavy.  Donleavy is incredible.  My favorite  of his books is The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman, but my comedy credentials aren’t as impressive as those who picked this one, so I defer to them.  Any Donleavy you read or gift is money in the humor bank.

A Merry Christmas (or Chanukah) to all, and to all a good laugh.