My new books 'Sod That': 103 Things Not To Do Before You Die' is out now.I'm also the author of Crap Towns, Crap Towns II, The Joy Of Sects and Bad Dates and Annus Horribilis.
Here are some reviews for Annus Horribilis
From the Guardian Review :
Ah, Christmas humour books. A funny old concept. As I write, there sits at my feet a box overflowing with titles that were so unfunny, so irritating, so desperate to make a quick buck that they don't deserve to be listed here. I'll deal with the books that at least have a chance of provoking a smile.
"List books" make a strong showing this year; half a dozen attractive hardbacks manage to be amusing and informative. Faber's meaty Ten Bad Dates With De Niro (£12.99) is endlessly dip-into-able. Its offbeat, detailed top-10s are all the better for being written by some of our wackier stars: the Coen brothers, Steven Soderbergh and DBC Pierre all chip in.
As a Dodo (Summersdale, £9.99) brings together entries from a popular blog that publishes faux obituaries - so, for example, RIP Humanity's Sense of Superiority, which kicked the bucket this year when chimps were shown to use tools. Touch Me, I'm Sick (Portrait, £9.99) enumerates the 52 creepiest love songs, from Maurice Chevalier's icky "Thank Heaven for Little Girls" to Sophie B Hawkins's outright illegal interpretation of "Hansel and Gretel".
If all that depresses you, enjoy a little schadenfreude with Annus Horribilis (John Murray, £9.99) - 365 tales of real-life "comic misfortune". One for fans of the Darwin awards, although save some sympathy for the intrepid Blackpool hamster that got nicked by the police for speeding down the pavement in a mini-racing-car (really!).
From the Book Bag
FIVE STARS (!!!!)
You know you are having a bad day when you go to a tattooists’ to have a huge emblem of your favourite football team emblazoned on your back, only to find later that the artist was a fan of a rival team and so left you with an indelible huge willy instead.
You know you could have been a bit more sensible when you go to visit a friend in jail, not only carrying cocaine and a gun, but in the same clink where you have arranged for a friend to do your current term there in your place. (This is not the same prison as where the inmates used the trampoline they were gifted to boing their way over the walls – where the governor had realised something rum was happening when the prisoners requested tunnelling gear “for a play they were doing about minersâ€.)
You know the gods of irony are looking ill upon you when you campaign for decades for your village to have a bypass, partly at least on safety grounds, only to suffer a car crash while previewing the incomplete road.
I could go on, spoiling this very fine and funny book for you by retelling my personal highlights. I loved the Tory whip who thought he was giving a colleague a ticking off, and ended up booting the Belgian ambassador in the derriere and knocking him down the Commons stairs. I sympathise with the chap who hid under his ex-wife’s bed to vengefully record her with a new man, only to get a repeat face full of bed-spring before the lover called an ambulance for him. And I am still trying to work out how Burt Reynolds signed his name in wet concrete, and got it wrong.
There is no mistaking this is a bit of a stocking-filler, but one well worth considering for dipping into at any time of the year. Indeed it is styled like a year-book of mishaps, with some for every day of the year. (The cover artist was having an off-day when he announced 365 stories herein – so many days have two or three there must be more like five hundred.) The more poignant famous last words are also included.
Cynics would suggest there is a lot here that is just an urban myth. Well, I beg to differ. Sure, one or two never get located anywhere, and one alleges the involvement of a two ton wild boar, but on the whole the research seems to have been thorough.
As with any such novelty book the style of writing must be friendly – the editorialising amenable. And so it is here, although the individualistic style the author used, say, in his review of his own book on Amazon, is given a back-seat to just a straight, slightly dry telling. April 3rd is probably the strongest example of this.
I did cringe when the second story in the introduction was *that one* about the chap who attached helium balloons to a deck-chair and ended up in a major flight-path, but there is so much material here that was new to me, and not recycled from The Darwin Awards, You Couldn’t Make it Up, Another Bad Year and all the other precedents. It reaches from a few years ago (Coca-Cola and Dasani) to times past (Arnold Bennett having his own problems with water) and much beyond, even to antiquity. And it has a great topicality and freshness too, with the most recent entry from 2007 dated April 26th.
I am guessing that February 29th’s entry will be bonus material for next season’s paperback reissue, and I hope the several typos are fixed by then (Sept 9th is just once when the dates don’t tally, and what’s with “disturbing the piece†in November?) but until then this is a complete and very amusing collection of reasons to be cheerful.
The definition of a good year? One in which you get this sent to you from the author – thanks very much to Sam Jordison who annotated his copy to all at the Bookbag. Please note this had no bearing on our recommendation and star rating. We’re not as daft as the people in this lovely novelty.
--
I am of course, ashamed of the typos they point out. But February 29 was meant to be a joke, innit? You have to read my oh-so-funny index to see why...
--
From Other stories
The Man with the Flaming Trousers, and Other Stories
Jordison_2 It says here on the back of Annus Horribilis by Sam Jordison "Think you've had a bad day?". Quite often, I complain about having had a hard day/being tired/things not going right. After reading this book, however, I see that I really am rather fortunate.
This is a collection of stories - at least one for each day of the year - about awful but funny things that have happened to people. Sort of the like the Darwin Awards without anyone necessarily dying. (Although a few Darwin winners do make it into Jordison's book.) As I mentioned a while ago, on my birthday in 2002 a man accidentally set fire to his own trousers while simultaneously smoking, trying to pull up his trousers and running away from the police. I can't tell you how many times I've told this story to people now.
"Hello, I'm Kirsty. Did you know that there was once a man who...?"
Cue slightly glazed looks and vague smiles. I remain unabashed, however, and have been accosting people (mainly Boyfriend to be fair) with other tales of woe. My other favourites include:
* Arnold Schoenberg's fear of the number 13 being alarmingly prescient when he died on Friday 13th, at 13 minutes to midnight, aged 76 (7+6=13).
* The Australian woman who sat at a red traffic light for 2 days because she hadn't realised it was broken.
* The man from Paisley (the next town over from where I grew up in Scotland) who worked in a pet shop and was sacked for juggling guinea pigs.
* The man whose pals broke him out of jail by way of a ploy too cunning even for 'Prison Break': they faxed the jail pretending to be from the local court, demanding the jailbird's release. And it worked. (Sadly, the hapless felon was rearrested soon afterwards while watching telly at his mum's house).
I promise not to complain about my day every again, unless I set my jeans on fire, etc. Good fun all round, this book.
From Toasting Napolean
Nothing depresses an author more than seeing the infinitude of talented competition that keeps his Meisterwerk off the shelves. So curse you, Sam Jordison, for Annus Horribilis - an Xmas novelty book that'll be fighting This Little Britain for the Christmas stocking pound this December.
Annus Horribilis is one of those strangely addictive books that you don't mean to keep dipping into but somehow still do. It's a compilation of comic disaster stories from round the world - the radio DJ whose wife flogged his Lotus sports car on eBay & others of that type. The book is very nicely produced actually, by John Murray. Interesting to me, since I turned down JM in favour of 4th Estate for TLB. A very giveable gift & the sort of thing that you'd quite like to be given if you're the Xmas loo book type.
Sam & I have a bet as to who will be first to the top of the hardback non-fiction bestseller charts. We're both pretty confident of our products. Confident enough to have 5p resting on the outcome, at any rate.
If you are evil and want to help Sam win this bet, you can click here to buy his book. (Worth doing actually just to admire the bare-faced cheek of his self-authored 'customer' review).
If, on the other hand, you are a good soul and you want to be rewarded in heaven with lots of virgins & clotted cream teas, etc, then you should go here and buy my book.
Or, the hell with it, buy lots of copies of both and Sam & I will simply fight a duel in the University Parks.
--
A few links:
Annus Horribilis
Guardian blogs and articles
A few other bits of journalism
An infrequently updated religion blog
When Dates Go Bad website
Annus Horribilis
The Joy Of Sects
Bad Dates
My first book-form brain-child, Crap Towns
If you like my writing you might also enjoy reading Shelley The Republican
