Furiously Happy - Jenny Lawson

I only just remembered that I completely forgot to post a review for this book when I finished it last month! Normally I'm quite good, but I must have been pretty distracted at that point.

Furiously Happy is the second of Jenny Lawson's memoirs. The first, Let's Pretend This Never Happened, is more of your usual autobiography, i.e. an account of the author's life to date, although Jenny Lawson's life is far from average and much of it reads more like a surreal comedy than an autobiography.

Furiously Happy is more of a selection of anecdotes, vaguely arranged by theme. Lawson manages to make her experiences with mental illness hilarious, bizarre and often very touching at the same time. From travelling Australia in a kangaroo onesie to being chased down the road by swans (thinking about it, many of the stories are animal-related in some way, shape or form), Lawson's stories are unexpected and very original.

Of course the core theme of the book is at heart very serious. I'm sure everyone out there has times when they feel depressed, slightly unhinged or just plain wrong, even those who aren't diagnosed with any kind of mental illness, and Lawson's central message behind all of this is that you aren't alone in this.

This is a very candid, warm and open account of her own experiences, which is very funny in itself and behind the humour holds a complex and comforting message to the reader.

Next up: Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset

Lullaby - Chuck Palahniuk

Reporter Carl Streator has been assigned to investigating Sudden Infant Death Syndrome for his newspaper, and notices a pattern in all the scenes he's been called to see. At every single one of them, a poetry anthology is, or has been, open at page 27 on an old African culling song. To confirm this theory, he reads the poem to his editor, who fails to come in to work the following day. However, we discover that this is also a very personal quest for Streator – he accidentally caused the death of his own wife and child 20 years earlier by reading them the very same poem.

Occult real estate agent Helen Hoover Boyle (who specialises in selling haunted houses and profiting by the frequent sales commissions as clients are keen to get rid of them again very quickly), has come to the same conclusion as Streator through her own investigations. The pair, along with Helen's secretary Mona and Mona's hippie boyfriend Oyster, race to destroy the remaining 200 copies of a limited edition print, before the poem becomes public knowledge.

Lullaby is at once disturbing, gripping and surprisingly funny in a bizarre, cynical kind of way. Palahniuk explores the different temptations for people with an inhuman power, the power to kill anyone they want to, instantly, with no more than a thought or a few words. How it changes the characters and the ways they cope with it forms a fascinating part of the story.

The brusque, matter-of-fact narrative tone lends a poignancy to grief, and a sense of detachment to several rather gory scenes, and the characters are colourful and eccentric in a manner more usually found in comedic novels.

Lullaby is a fascinating, dark but sometimes very funny exploration of the power of language and of the corruption of power. Very much worth reading, and I can guarantee you'll never have read anything like it before.

Next up: Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson