Grumpy Old Holidays / Judith Holder

Grumpy Old Holidays

category: humour, travel, author:

Judith Holder

book ?? of Grumpy Old...
original copyright 2007,
read in October 2010

Agamedes' opinion: 6 out of 10

A lot of funny bits... surrounded by a lot of words.

The Grumpy concept is good. Very entertaining. For a while. Then you begin to think, So what?!

There are other holiday / humour books which are better. Grumpy is, well, a series of grumps. Okay, a lot of it is funny. But with the minimum of writer's effort. Which is fine (clever, lazy). For a while. Then you start to wish that the "author" had done more than tie together a lot of holiday-related complaints.

Compare Grumpy to Molvania: a land untouched by modern dentistry, by Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner & Rob Sitch. If I reread it I'll link this to a PissWeakly review... Meanwhile, a quote from a "better" book of humour + holiday:

Meanwhile, a little further south are the Pucjicj Hills where keen hikers can walk for miles without seeing so much as a road or electricity pylon, provided of course they do it at night.

Molvania is both funny and inventive: actual imagination has gone into writing the book. Okay, Grumpy is funny and somewhat inventive -- but the humour depends on the readers' acceptance of the worst aspects of holidays. Molvania takes the same stereotypes and invents a complete catalogue of holiday humour.

I jumped quite quickly through Grumpy; that's the best way. Read too slowly and it becomes boring. Read fast enough and there is a sustained level of enjoyment. Because the book does contain quite a lot of enjoyable material.

Enjoyable material... surrounded by a lot of extra words.

Read a bit of Grumpy now and then. Come back for a small dose of light sarcasm. Just don't attempt to read it all at once.

..o0o..

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