Sam Jordison

I have a soft spot for stupidity, not being the most together person on planet Earth myself, and so was delighted when Sam Jordison popped a copy of his latest book Annus Horribilis : A Chronicle of Comic Mishaps in the post for me.

Now I had expected Sam to be the highbrow literary sort ... after all, he blogs for the Guardian and earlier in the year took upon himself the arduous task of reviewing the whole Booker longlist. (And you don't get more respectable than that!)

But this collection show more of :

Mistakes, mishaps, cock-ups ...

is joyously funny, and deeply reassuring ... for it's really nice to know that there is always someone in the world capable of doing dafter things than you are.

The title of the book is Latin for "Horrible Year", a term famously used by Queen Elizabeth II in her Christmas message in 1992 when just about everything that could possibly have gone wrong for her, did indeed go wrong.

The book is designed for dipping into, with tales of gross stupidity and spectacularly bad fortune for every day of the year. This makes it the perfect book to keep on the beside table, or (dare I say it) in your toilet library. I can also see it being bought as a Christmas stocking-filler for those hard-to-buy-for folks in our lives, particularly those who need a little luring into books.

The stories were compiled, says Jordison in the introduction, from various newspapers, websites and history books and a few more were donated by the victims/perpetrators themselves. They are all supposed to be true, even if the veracity is impossible to test with 100% accuracy.

My very favourite anecdote is the one illustrated on the cover of the book: Larry Walters had always wanted to fly, and so tied weather balloons to his chair, planning to pop them when by shooting them when he wanted to descend.

Elsewhere, there's the story of the young man who stole electrical transformers because he wanted to build a time-machine so that he could go into the future to find out winning lottery numbers; the nobleman who travelled for seven long-years hoping that Queen Elizabeth would forget the fart he'd let off when he was bowing to her (did she heck!); the naturalist who discovered the first wild otter to be seen in the UK for forty years, only to run it down with his car; and the hapless prison governor who bought his inmates a trampoline which they used to bounce over the wall to freedom. show less

The idea of compiling a list of the worst places to live is a great idea; a counterpoint to the ubiquitous best places to live list. Unfortunately, any time most of your content comes in from the web, it's going to be spotty, especially here, where it appears to have been virtually unedited. "London" on a list of bad places to live is pretty risible; it's too big a place. There are areas in it which are among the best places in the world. Too many of the contributors are nothing more than show more splenetic, going on and on about how some yobbo crushed their parakeet when they were nine. A curate's egg of a book. show less

Eloise Millar is our guide in this wonderful, highly-enjoyable tour of London, one of the cradles of World Literature. In Literary London we find ourselves in numerous famous spots. Stations, squares, theatres, pubs, and churches. We meet a plethora of literary figures, following the steps of some of the giants of Literature.

From Shakespare, Marlowe, and Samuel Johnson to Marx, Dylan Thomas, Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf, Henry James and Zola, the list is endless. We travel to Trafalgar show more Square which became Victory Square in 1984, to Charing Cross to wave goodbye to Harry Potter, to Whitechapel following the traces of Jack the Ripper.

Between those famous and many other less illustrious spots, some of the greatest Literature of all times have been created, and the book is a tribute to Literature and to a city full of mysteries, blessed with a dark, bleak beauty. After all, when a novel is set in London, the city becomes a character. show less

The joke here is that just about everyone's town or nearest city is included in this book. In fact, I think the book is of the 50 most populous cities in the UK. Its very funny and an ideal gift for anyone British - the first thing they will do is thumb through to find out if their town is in it. Then watch their face as either they are amused or get all defensive when reading the criticism of their home town.