Literary Lapses

These century-old short humorous essays/stories are worth a read, and preferable, I think, to many of Mark Twain's similar attempts. At their best these are clever and original; my favourite was 'Boarding house geometry'. Leacock was a PhD student of Thorstein Veblen, by the way, and later a professor of economics at McGill University.

This collection of humorous short stories by one of Canada's most famous writers was published in 1910, and it represented his first work of fiction. The best stories were moderately amusing, most notably "My Financial Career", in which a nervous man opens and closes his first bank account in one visit; "How to be a Doctor", a guide to the practice of modern medicine and the care of the patient, in which removal of various body parts is essential to forming diagnoses; and "The New Food", a description of highly concentrated food pellets and the unfortunate demise of a baby who gobbled a bottle of them at a time. Unfortunately there were far more misses than hits in this collection, which was undoubtedly more amusing a century ago than show more it is now. show less

Amusing sketches, though unfortunately some stories included the casual racism of the time of writing.