When a volume unknown to you is billed as “one of the funniest books you will ever read” by one of the funniest writers you know (Bill Bryson), you’re bound for a treat. Originally published in Britain in the 1950s at the peak of the mountaineering craze after Everest’s ascent to the public’s eye, The Ascent of Rum Doodle is a comic chronicle of an invented expedition up “Rum Doodle”, a 40,000 and one-half foot peak in the Himalayas, making it a tad taller than its neighbor, Everest.
William Bowman’s tale is narrated by a stodgy old duffer named Binder, who has assembled an extraordinary team to conquer Rum Doodle, including Humphrey Jungle, the guide adept at getting lost, Christopher Wish, who has a thing about measuring things, Pong, a sadistic native cook, and Lancelot Constant, the language expert who manages to upset practically every one of the expedition’s three thousand Yogistani porters – who, you’ll be interested to know, speak their incomprehensive tongue by grunting through their stomachs.
Binder’s bumblers – can they really climb? Will they climb? Indeed they can, and do: higher and higher until … I’ll not spill the goodies here, let’s just call it their moment of “triumph.” Imagine Monty Python Climbs the Matterhorn, and you’ll get some idea of the hilarity of their adventures in this gem of literary-comedy. Not to be missed!
Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader is a charming and wryly hilarious celebration of the pleasures and powers of reading. It’s a flawlessly pitched novella that tells the tale of the Queen of England who one day finds herself wandering into a mobile library parked outside Buckingham Palace while chasing her corgi. After exchanging pleasantries with the librarian and a palace kitchen employee named Norman, the Queen borrows a book by Ivy Compton-Burnett whom the library considers “not a popular author”. “Why, I wonder” muses the Queen. “I made her a dame.” Enticed by the diversion that the somewhat dry Compton-Burnett novel supplies, she progresses to The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford, then J.R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip and other volumes under the tutelage of the now-promoted Norman. Soon her eagerness to lose herself in books is disrupting the machinery of royal protocol, to the bafflement of her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, the consternation of her private secretary, Sir Kevin, and the annoyance of the prime minister, who is put out at being quizzed on the books she lends him. Meanwhile, the court conspires to derail her literary education, but the queen is too clever to be caught in their stratagems, and continues to explore the commonwealth of letters with increasing admiration, devouring everything from showbiz memoirs to the works of Jean Genet and Henry James.
Bennett unspools his joke with a deft touch, gleefully skewering palace pretentions as he drops one witty literary reference after another into his narrative of a monarch’s literary happiness. Uncommonly funny, this little fable offers both comic relief and pleasures no book lovers should forgo!