Heaven to read, and you'll laugh like Hell!
I finally finished reading the book Chingi lent me: Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman. And it's simply hilarious!!! Seriously, I would recomment this to anybody who just wants to sit down, relax and have a good laugh. It's not one of those heavy-vocab books, although there are a few words here and there that might send you searching for a dictionary. (Although ineffable popped up a lotta times!)
The book is a satire - it makes light of the human race, and although it does not have a very interesting/plausible plot - it does help you see society in a humourous way! It's mainly about Armageddon...the End of Times is drawing near but the angel, Aziraphale, and the demon, Crowley, are very upset because they love the 20th century and all the funny high-tech gadgets humans have created. So, they put their differences aside and work together to delay Armageddon.
If you're ever feeling blue, this book will definitely put a put more colours in your day! After all, they do say that laughter is the best medicine, aight?
Anyway, I simply found the book so funny that I decided to blog a few excerpts from the book...
(Do keep in mind that the book was only written in the 1990s when they thought the 20th century was the peak of technology!)
This part talks about Crowley the demon.
Oh, he did his best to make their (human's) short lives miserable because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of generalized nastiness. There had been many times, over the past millennium, when he'd felt like sending a message back Below saying Look, we may as well give up right now, we might as well shut down Dis and Pandemonium and everywhere and move up here, there's nothing we can do to them that they don't do themselves and they do things we've never even thought of, often involving electrodes. They've got what we lack. They've got imagination. And electricity, of course.
This one talks about the legend behind a nunnery.
Saint Beryl Articulatus of Cracow, reputed to have been martyred in the middle of the fifth century. According to legend, Beryl was a young woman who was betrothed against her will to a pagan, Prince Casimir. On their wedding night she prayed to the Lord to intercede, vaguely expecting a miraculous beard to appear, and had in fact already laid in a small ivory handled razor, suitable for ladies, against this very eventuality; instead the Lord granted Beryl the miraculous ability to chatter continually about whatever was on her mind, however inconsequential, without pause for breath or food.
According to one version of the legend, Beryl was strangled by Prince Casimir three weeks after the wedding, with their marriage still unconsummated. She died a virgin and a martyr, chattering to the end.
According to another version of the legend, Casimir bought himself a set of earplugs, and she died in bed, with him, at the age of sixty two.
The Chattering Order of Saint Beryl is under a vow to emulate Saint Beryl at all times, except on Tuesday afternoons, for half an hour, when the nuns are permitted to shut up, and, if they wish, to play table tennis.
This bit explains Crowley's (the demon) sentiments towards Satanists.
Crowley always found them embarrassing. You couldn't actually be rude to them , but you couldn't help feeling about them the same way that, say, a Vietnam veteran would feel about someone who wears combat gear to Neighbourhood Watch meetings.
Besides, they were so depressingly enthusiastic. Take all that stuff with the inverted crosses and pentagram and cockerels. It mystified most demons. It wasn't the least bit necessary. All you needed to become a Satanist was an effort of will....
...There were people who called themselves Satanists who made Crowley squirm. It wasn't just the things they did, it was the way they blamed it all on Hell. They'd come up with some stomach-churning idea that no demon could have thought of in a thousand years, some dark and mindless unpleasantness that only a fully-functioning human brain could conceive, then shout 'The Devil Made Me Do It' and get the sympathy of the court when the whole point was that the Devil hardly ever made anyone do anything. He didn't have to.
This part introduces a character named Julia.
Julia Petley from Hair Today, the hairdressers' on the High Street, fresh out of school and convinced that she herself had unplumbed occult depths. In order to enhance the occult aspects of herself, Julia had begun to wear far too much handbeaten silver jewellery and green eyeshadow. She felt she looked haunted and gaunt and romantic, and she would have, if she had lost another thirty pounds. She was convinced that she was anorexic, because every time she looked in the mirror she did indeed see a fat person.
Just a bit I found funny, in a wicked sort-of way.
Cases of spontaneous human combustion are on record all over the world. One minute someone's quite happily chugging along with their life; the next there's a sad photograph of a pile of ashes and a lonely and mysteriously uncharred foot or hand. Cases of spontaneous vehicular combustion are less well documented . Whatever the statistics were, they had just gone up by one.
And just another funny bit...
Sometimes human being are very much like bees. Bees are fiercely protective of their hive, provided you are outside it. Once you're in, the workers sort of assume that it must have been cleared by management and take no notice; various freeloading insects have evolved a mellifluous existence because of this very fact. Humans act the same way.
Well, I hope you guys had a good laugh. I know I did. :) But I know not everyone shares the same sense of humour! Anyway, I'm off to celebrate my dad's birthday this weekend. Bro & Chingi are coming down, so it'll be a good weekend! :)
