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I just finished re-reading one of my favorites, “Cold Comfort Farm.” Written in 1932, it’s a parody of the rural genre of Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence.

Yeah, sounds fun, right? Stick with me, it’s worth it. I’ve never read Thomas Hardy or D. H. Lawrence, and I loved it.

Flora Poste, an orphan at 19 with an expensive and unmarketable education, is faced with the decision of moving in with relatives. The ones she selects are the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm in Howling, Sussex.

Determined to tidy up the personal lives of her passionately dysfunctional relatives, Flora embarkes on a campaign worthy of Hannibal, encountering fierce resistance. Flora is the enemy of melodrama.

Here’s Flora meeting her cousin Reuben:

The man’s big body, etched menacingly against the bleak light stabbed in from the low windows, did not move. His thoughts swirled like a beck in spate behind the sodden grey furrows of his face. A woman…Blast! Blast! Come to wrest away from him the land whose love fermented in his veins like slow yeast. She-woman. Young, soft-colored, insolent. His gaze was suddenly edged by a fleshly taint. Break her. Break. Keep and hold fast the land. The land, the iron furrows of frosted earth under the rain-lust, the fecund spears of rain, the swelling, slow burst of seed-sheaths, the slow smell of cows and cry of cows, the trampling bride-pride of the bull in his hour. All his, all his –
“Will you have some bread and butter?” asked Flora, handing him a cup of tea. “Oh, never mind your boots. Adam can sweep the mud up afterwards. Do come in.”

Faced with the Starkadder’s monumental strangeness, Flora decides to send her cousin Amos off on a preaching tour, marry her flower-child cousin Elphine to the son of the local gentry and deal with the matriarch Aunt Ada Doom once and for all. (Aunt Ada once “saw something nasty in the woodshed” and has never been quite the same – though her madness conveniently doesn’t stop her from keeping track of the farm’s poultry earnings.)

Something about the book reminds me of my adolescence, but in a good way. In high school I had a bunch of friends whose lives needed managing (back when I was still young enough to think that I should be the one managing them.) That was also the time period that I decided that tragic, artistic souls took themselves too seriously. Also that hemp clothes do nothing for a girl’s figure and that patchouli oil cannot perform the same function as anti-perspirant. Smells Like Teen Spirit indeed.

Verdict: 9 out of 10. It’s lighthearted and bracing at the same time, and even though I don’t catch some of the 1930s British references, I love reading this book.

I worry that I’m not being fair to Augusten Burroughs. The special place in my heart for gay men with dysfunctional families, obsessive-compulsive tendencies and strong ties to New York City who write semi-autobiographical memoirs – well, that place is already pretty filled by David Rakoff and David Sedaris.

The comparison is particularly strong with David Sedaris: both in committed long-term relationships, Northerners with Southern roots, compulsive smokers (although Burroughs has now transferred his addiction to nicotine gum), larger-than-life mothers, adolescent friendships with tough ballsy girls, a series of humiliating jobs and childhoods dominated by intricate self-imposed rituals.

And okay, maybe that could describe a lot of people. But their styles of writing are so similar – and Sedaris got to me first. So it’s hard for me to objectively appreciate Burroughs.

Anyway, “Possible Side Effects.” It’s a collection of essays, in no chronological order. He writes about his love for his dogs, the curse of chapped hands, alcoholism, getting hooked on nicotine gum and some very disturbing episodes from his childhood.

It’s those sections about his childhood that reminded me too much of “A Beautiful Mind.” Remember when that movie was winning sackfuls of awards? It was about a schizophrenic math prodigy. I couldn’t bear that movie (or “Shine” with Geoffrey Rush) because whatever uplifting message it may have had was drowned for me beneath the horror of not being in control of your own mind.

So debilitating mental illness will never be something I look for in my recreational entertainment, and Burroughs delivers plenty of it through the character of his mother. She suffered from a glittering, manic and magnetic psychosis. (You’ve probably encountered someone like that in your own life, especially if you got a liberal arts degree in college.) It was difficult for me to read while experiencing what was essentially a protracted wince.

Verdict: 5 out of 10. That probably says more about me than about Burroughs, but hey, it’s my review.

In the blink of an eye, Charlie Asher’s world fell apart – not that he hadn’t been expecting it. He was a worrier. After his wife died suddenly, Charlie was left with an infant daughter, a thrift store to run, and an eerie magnatism for the soon-to-be-dead. Oh, and a part-time job as a reaper, whose job duties are outlined in the manual “The Great Big Book of Death.”

I’d read Moore’s book “Fluke” before, and he has a knack for creating bizzare characters. There’s Charlie’s daughter, Sophie, who can kill with the word “kitty” and is guarded by hellhounds; his lesbian sister, Jane, who keeps stealing his suits; a goth-girl disciple and retail clerk; a 7-foot-tall fellow “Death Merchant” named Minty Fresh; a Buddhist with a talent for reanimating squirrel parts; and the Morrigan, a hostile trio of Celtic death-goddess harpies.

From Moore’s acknowledgments, it’s clear that he wrote this book while his mother was dying, and he dedicates “A Dirty Job” to hospice workers and volunteers. Hospice workers appear in several cameos, and his descriptions of families in mourning feel very authentic.

Another theme Moore is enchanted with is the idea of “Beta Males”:

While Alpha Males are often gifted with superior physical attributes – size, strength, speed, good looks – selected by evolution over the eons by the strongest surviving and, essentially, getting all the girls, the Beta Male gene has survived not by meeting and overcoming adversity, but by anticipating and avoiding it. That is, when the Alpha Males were out charging after mastadons, the Beta Males could imagine in advance that attacking what was essentially an an angry, wooly bulldozer with a pointy stick might be a losing proposition, so they hung back at camp to console the grieving widows.

Our hero Charlie Asher is most decidedly a Beta male.

So, what about this book got on my nerves? Continued and egregious use of a term I’d never heard used before (and would be hesitant about entering into a Google search engine): f*ck-puppets. The asterisk is mine, because my dead grandmas may be reading this from heaven. The more grandmother-appropriate equivalent would be “mistresses” or “kept women.” It made me all uncomfortable, and I don’t enjoy feeling like a prude, Christopher Moore!

But don’t get me wrong, I really liked this book. In fact, it won my heart the second I realized that the cover was glow-in-the-dark. I am all about the meaningless externals.

Verdict: 8 out of 10. I read it in one sitting, and laughed until my seat neighbor on the airplane started looking at me funny.

For an even better book with a similar sense of macabre whimsy, read “Good Omens” by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. “Good Omens” would score a 9.5 on my scale. Armageddon has never been this funny.

Some books have appeared in my life at exactly the moment I needed or could appreciate them. This is one of those books.

It was the autumn of 2003, and I was spending two weeks in Paris as a prologue to a three-month internship in Prague. (Grad school rocked.) It was the first time I’d been in a country whose language I didn’t speak. My French is abominable, and my Czech was non-existent (I did later learn some Czech; sadly, all that remains in my memory banks is “Can I buy a metro ticket?”)

I had seminars through the mid-afternoon, but after that I was free to wander around (my very favorite pastime). I was spending an awful lot of time in the Gilbert & Jeune bookstores, which had a respectable number of new and used books in English. I reached down and plucked this book from the bottom shelf, then sat down on the floor to flip through it. Fifteen minutes later I had to buy the book and leave the store, because I was making a public spectacle of myself by laughing so hard.

P. J. O’Rourke was a foreign correspondent for Rolling Stone magazine from the 1980s through 2001, and “Holidays in Hell” is a collection of his travel stories, published in 1988. These weren’t the most sought-after travel locales. O’Rourke went to places like Lebanon, Nicaragua, Poland, El Salvador, Jim Bakker’s Heritage U.S.A., Northern Ireland and Panama, and got as drunk as he could on whatever local liquor was available.

But the article that was making me burst forth with those embarrassing snorting laughs was “Among the Euro-Weenies,” written from Paris in a fit of pique as O’Rourke tried desperately to get a visa for Libya in time for the coolest of the 1986 bombings.

I’ve been over here for one grey, dank spring month now, and I think I can tell you why everyone with an IQ bigger than his hat size hits the beach at Ellis Island. Say what you want about ‘land of opportunity’ and ‘purple mountain majesty above the fruited plain’, our forbearers moved to the United States because they were sick to death of lukewarm beer – and lukewarm coffee and lukewarm bath water and lukewarm mystery cutlets with mucky-colored mushroom cheese junk on them. Everything in Europe is lukewarm except the radiators. You could use the radiators to make party ice. But nobody does.

I loved this entire book, especially “Seoul Brothers,” “What do they do for fun in Warsaw?” and “The Holy Land – God’s monkey house.” But there were two quotes in “Holidays in Hell” that I’ve carried with me, quotes that helped prepare me for the next three months of editing articles about the former Soviet republics and the Balkans.

The first wasn’t actually O’Rourke’s, but it was on his dedication page:

Often the more you understand, the less you forgive. – Jillian Becker, Director of Institute for the Study of Terrorism

The second is from his introduction:

Half the world’s suffering is caused by earnest messages contained in grand theories bearing no relation to reality – Marxism and No-Fault Auto Insurance, to name two. Earnestness is just stupidity sent to college.

And oh, it is true. As someone who can spell Srebrenica, I tell you it is true.

The history behind the little pink packets my grandmother used to lift from restaurants is a strange one, and Rich Cohen is a strange narrator for the story. As the disinherited grandson of Sweet ‘n Low inventors Ben and Betty Eisenstadt, “all they have left me is this story.”

The memoir follows Grandpa Ben as he invents the sugar packet (only to be screwed over by the Domino Sugar Company) then Sweet ‘n Low, weathers the anti-saccharine campaign by the FDA in the ’70s, only to be busted for mob corruption in the ’90s. Yes! Sweet ‘n Low was under federal investigation. Think about that the next time you’re sweetening your coffee. The final section of the book deals with the disinheritance of Cohen’s mother, the once-favorite daughter, for reasons that seem unclear even to the participants.

“To be disinherited is to be set free,” writes Cohen. It’s a theme he returns to several times during the book, that to be without family is to be free. To be encumbered by family is to be trapped, tied down, smothered to death by loving arms.

It’s the five-mile-walk-to-school-uphill-both ways story that your grandfather tells to make you feel weak and lazy….I sometimes think a family is no more than a collection of such stories, a chronicle that locks you down like the safety bar that crosses your lap before the roller-coaster leaves the platform, without which you would fly away in the turns.

But his memoir isn’t filled with bitterness as much as it’s filled with exasperated love for family members fantastic in their weirdness.

When I was briefing my brother-in-law on his new family and told him that [Aunt] Gladys had not left the house since the Nixon administration, he said, “You mean mostly she stays in the house but now and then she leaves the house to go to the store?” I said, “I mean mostly she stays in her room but now and then she leaves her room to go to the bathroom.”

Or his grandmother Betty:

[Her brother's] birth taught Betty lessons she would follow for the rest of her life: that boys are better than girls, that love is finite, that love is coal, and there is a shortage, and there will never be enough to go around.

And his uncle Marvin (or, as he insisted on being called, “Marvelous”):

He said he had been prescribed a pill for fading memory, but told me he forgets to take it. He does remember that he forgets, which struck me as suspicious.

It’s also a love letter to Brooklyn. I was born without the New York City gene. It’s never been my dream to live there, nor have I ever bothered to visit friends while they were living there. The only part of NYC I’ve set foot in is the JFK airport. I spent a summer during college in Ireland with a group of NYU students, and I was left with the impression that the only topic of interest for people from New York is New York restaurants.

But a lot of Midwestern kids (especially in their high school years) have a dream, a longing, an infatuation with New York City that borders on the pathological. Rich Cohen is one of these. He was born and grew up in Illinois, but his extended family lived in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is another character, another quirky family member who helped shape the trajectory of the company. Even I grew to have some affection for it.

Verdict: 8.5 out of 10 for lyrical prose and funny-from-the-outside family drama.

It’s a dicey business to write non-fiction about people who are still alive to refute everything you’ve said about them. Cohen wrote an article on Slate.com called “Just Screw It: How I told my family I was writing about our feud over the Sweet ‘n Low fortune” that’s well worth a read.

I’m plugging away on a book about the Crimean War (what? I’m totally normal!), but I picked this novel up a few weeks ago when I was at that seminar that I said I’d write about but then totally didn’t. With me so far?

So, “Company.” Our hero Jones has just come out of school, and he begins work at the Zephyr Corporation, a depressing amalgam of workplace archetypes we’ve all met at one time or another.

For example:

“On level 14, Elizabeth is falling in love. This is what makes her such a good sales rep, and an emotional basket case: she falls in love with her customers. It’s hard to convey just how wretchedly, boot-lickingly draining it is to be a salesperson. Sales is a business of relationships, and you must cultivate customers with tenderness and love, like cabbages in winter, even when the customer is an egomaniacal asshole you want to hit with a shovel. There is something wrong with the kind of person who becomes a sales rep, or if not, there is something wrong after six months.”

Or:

“Freddy has been a sales assistant for five years. He is quick-witted, inventive, and full of ideas, so long as that’s okay with everyone else. Freddy is a participant. A member. He is happiest when he’s blending in with a crowd. In any group of people, the one you can’t remember is Freddy.”

The thing is, even though this company seems like any other, Jones can’t find out what exactly it is that Zephyr does. None of his co-workers can supply anything more detailed than that it’s a “holdings company.” But when he finally finds out the answer, it sends him up the corporate ladder and through the looking glass. (Spoiler Alert: No, soylent green is not made out of people.)

The plot is very clever, and it made me see some of the companies I’ve worked for in a fresh light. But I think what cinched it for me were the dead-on details about office life, and how hundreds of years of civilization can break down in a room with seven people and six donuts.

Verdict: If you’ve ever worked in a corporate setting, 8 out of 10. If you went to med school instead, 6.5.

Barry is also the author of “Jennifer Government,” a book which had a little more madcap zaniness and a lot more guns. What happens when the free market takes over the free world, corporate sponsors replace last names, Nike’s viral marketing takes a deadly turn and the police start sub-contracting with the NRA? Well, hilarity ensues, of course.