Never Hit A Jellyfish with a Spade by Guy Browning

I'm not sure where my genius-of-a-friend Rachel gets her books. After looking at the books she has, I feel like mine are so boring. She has cool books about cats and them taking over the world (well, something like that), and I have... Anna Karenina (I love that book though).

Because I've been banned from borrowing books from the library *coughfinalexamscough*, I've resorted to:

a. Borrowing from kind friends
b. Buying more books (which has already started to hurt me financially)

Well, this state of affairs cannot continue, but on the bright side, in less than 2 months, I'll be free to go to the library. Till then, I guess I'll have to continue borrowing books and try my best to keep away from places that sell books.

Well, so one of the brilliant books that Rachel lent me was "Never Hit A Jellyfish With A Spade: How to Survive Life's Smaller Challenges" by Guy browning. The book is a satirical take on life (the tone is such that there's no way you can believe that it's a serious manual), although the humour is very British.

The testament to how effective this book is, is that Euphe, who hardly reads anything other than Sarah Dessen (I can't believe it took me till last year, or was it two years ago? to recommend that to her), when I asked her to read the first chapter, just continued reading.

In fact, when I tried to recommend some particular chapter, she actually brushed me off to continue reading in sequence. That's a rare occasion, and really, a good book is one that can get a non-reader to read.

There is, however, one flaw with the book: The humour at times, can be very crude. Some sections, like "How to be religious" is quite offensive (at least, it doesn't talk specifically about Christianity, but that's not much of a balm) and should be skipped altogether. In fact, the entire love section, which is on "Love and Marriage" should be skipped because it promotes the wrong types of values; not to mention that it is the section where the humour is the crudest (mostly because of the subject matter).

I'm quite interested in looking for more of Guy Browning's books. So far, Littered with Books doesn't have it (although they have other fantastic looking humour books), but I think a big store like Kinokuniya will have it. I do know, that he has published other books, and if they're anything like this one, then I will definitely be entertained.