I love her so much.
A Year In Provence by Peter Mayle is lighthearted and sunny. A British office worker and his wife decide to pull up stakes and move to Provence and renovate an old farmhouse. Lots of gentle fun poked at the locals and at French customs in general, plus descriptions of lovely French food and wine.
Three Men in a Boat would be a good recommendation too.
Yeah, that was good. I thought he’d make a good host, but apparently he’s moved to Australia now.
Funnily weird or weirdly funny.
Doorways In the Sand - Roger Zelazny
Three by Max Braithwaite, about growing up and young adulthood/marriage in Saskatchewan during the Depression:
Never Sleep Three in A Bed
Why Shoot the Teacher?
The Night We Stole the Mountie’s Car
They’re based on his own life experience, and as @thorny_locust says, although not written as period novels, they essentially are, written by someonewho as a kid who saw the Kaiser being burnt in effigy in small town Saskatchewan on November 11, 1918,
Just remembered Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. Definitely fits the criteria of “light and amusing,” especially since Leacock was a humorist.
And while Farley Mowat got very heavy in some of his works, he has two that would fit the criteria. First, The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, about his childhood, and the adventures (and misadventures) that he and his dog shared. Next would be The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float. Again, autobiographical, but this time he tries to sail a sailboat from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Montreal, Quebec. And everything that can possibly go wrong, does.
I enthusiastically endorse this suggestion, as well as the James Herriott one.
When twelve-year-old Gratuity (“Tip”) Tucci is assigned to write five pages on “The True Meaning of Smekday” for the National Time Capsule contest, she’s not sure where to begin; when her mom started telling everyone about the messages aliens were sending through a mole on the back of her neck? Maybe on Christmas Eve, when huge bizarre spaceships descended on Earth and the aliens – called Boov – abducted her mother? Or when the Boov declared Earth a colony, renamed it “Smekland” (in honor of glorious Captain Smek), and forced all Americans to relocate to Florida via rocketpod?
erm didn’t that get adapted into the DreamWorks “home” movie and Netflix series?
Plus 2.
(@Spoons, it is becoming apparent that we had the same reading list as teenagers.)
(And The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be is another Saskatchewan growing-up-in-the Depression story. It was mind-blowing to me as a kid to start reading a book about places I had actually been to, in my home province. The story of Farley trying to get a skunk out of the cellar with a garden hose stands out in my memory. Mutt, the dog, has other plans.)
I"m afraid that’s been my reaction as well. I don’t mean to suggest they aren’t good books; but they just never did anything for me, even though I’ve read all of Hornblower (several times), all of Ramage (several times) and many Bolithos. I"ve never got through a Maturin-Aubrey book. It’s odd, considering how popular they are, but I guess @CalMeacham and I are in the minority.
If you like chess, and plot puzzles, then The Eight by Katherine Neville might suit.
I’ll add another voice for Christopher Moore, at least for a few of his books. I see three others in this thread have already suggested his books.
His style is vaguely kinda-sorta similar to Vonnegut, to whom he is sometimes compared. My response to that is, well, sort-of but not quite. After reading three of his books, I began to get the sense that once you’ve read three, you’ve read them all.
The three I read were Practical Demonkeeping, Coyote Blue, and The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove. I’ll recommend at least those three.
ETA: I’ll note that Practical Demonkeeping and Lust Lizard were set in the same city, and although he changed the name, it is a real place and perfectly recognizable to anyone who lives in that region (as I did at the time).
Some great stuff suggested here. I can see I’ve got some new authors to explore. But I popped in to suggest William Goldman’s The Princess Bride if you haven’t already read it. One of my all time favorites, and although it’s the same story as the movie, the book is completely different. And much more fun.
The books I always go back to are the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome, written and set in the early 1930s.
They are nominally children’s books, but they could equally well be called books about children rather than for children, and they’re even more enjoyable for adults. They are difficult to categorise in many ways. The quality of writing is exceptional, and certainly not simplified for children.
When Arthur Ransome was asked whether he wrote for adults or children, he said that he didn’t write for any particular audience – he wrote what he enjoyed himself. But like all great children’s writers, he never lost the ability to see the world through the eyes of a child.
All the books are about very realistic children from happy, caring families enjoying their school holidays. They are mostly set in the Lake District, but there are several other locations too. That may sound boring, but it’s not. Every book is unique, and the series gets better and better as it goes on.
Swallow and Amazon are the names of two small sailing boats, sailed by two sets of children on an 8 mile long lake with islands, in the Lake District in northern England. Sailing is an ongoing theme, and birds too.
Across the whole series there are about 14 or 15 children that we get to know well, and many small boats. There are more girls than boys, and the girls tend to be stronger characters.
There’s a constant stream of warm humour throughout the books, never slapstick, and never laughing at anyone, but sometimes laugh-out-loud funny.
There are sometimes serious and dangerous incidents – even life-threatening incidents – but nothing improbable in the real world.
Scene from the 1974 movie of the first book.
I have often been asked how I came to write Swallows and Amazons. The answer is that it had its beginning long, long ago when, as children, my brother, my sisters and I spent most of our holidays on a farm at the south end of Coniston. We played in or on the lake or on the hills above it, finding friends in the farmers and shepherds and charcoal-burners whose smoke rose from the coppice woods along the shore.
We adored the place. Coming to it, we used to run down to the lake, dip our hands in and wish, as if we had just seen the new moon. Going away from it, we were half drowned in tears. While away from it, as children and as grown-ups, we dreamt about it. No matter where I was, wandering about the world, I used at night to look for the North Star and, in my mind’s eye, could see the beloved skyline of great hills beneath it.
Swallows and Amazons grew out of those old memories. I could not help writing it. It almost wrote itself.
– Arthur Ransome
Hey! Mr Kidd was a high school/college friend of my sister. He’s a stupidly talented graphic designer by trade. I suppose I should read this at some point.
It did, yes.
You won’t be sorry!
Really? I don’t find his style at all like Vonnegut’s. I’ve never felt the need to quote a Vonnegut witticism every other page the way I do with Moore. In fact, Vonnegut doesn’t seem at all given to witticism. He writes stories that are weird and frequently outrageous, but not laugh-out-loud funny.
I don’t find their styles similar at all.
I used to follow his blog fairly regularly, and then about 10 or so years ago he quit updating it and he just seemed to drop off the face of the earth. So that’s where he wound up…