skygiants

Okay, guys, if you have ever read a tragically ridiculous Gothic novel, or long, long, depressing rural English novel (i.e. anything written by Thomas Hardy), and thought to yourself, "Man, I really wish someone would just smack these characters into sanity!" then you MUST read Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons. My friend dropped it off at my house the other day and announced that it was necessary to my health that I read it, and from the moment we met the side character whose passion was collecting brassieres and maintaining polite correspondence with the swarms of young men who went off to foreign climes for unrequited love of her, I was a convert!

Basically Stella Gibbons had read far, far too many of the sort of English novels where everyone in the country is wild, melancholy, sex-obsessed, and In Tune With Nature, and decided to drop into the middle of that kind of book a practical young lady who actually knows about things like contraception and how to get taxicabs - yes, even in Howling, Sussex. This young lady, recently orphaned Flora Poste, has decided to set the lives of all her wild, melancholy and sex-obsessed long-lost relatives in order and teach them the joys of common sense, civilization, and basic practices of hygiene. Result: hilarity! Even if you don't agree with quite all the solutions Flora comes up with, it is SUCH a joy to watch ridiculous Types that you see far too often smacked on the head and set straight by a dose of Higher Common Sense. Next I want Flora Poste to tackle the fantasy epic! Sadly this book was written in the thirties, so that is unlikely to happen, but I CAN DREAM.