Thursday, August 11, 2011

Top 10 funny teen boy books

Don Calame's first YA novel is Swim the Fly.

About the book, from the publisher:
Fifteen-year-old Matt Gratton and his two best friends, Coop and Sean, always set themselves a summertime goal. This year's? To see a real-live naked girl for the first time -- quite a challenge, given that none of the guys has the nerve to even ask a girl out on a date. But catching a girl in the buff starts to look easy compared to Matt's other summertime aspiration: to swim the 100-yard butterfly (the hardest stroke known to God or man) as a way to impress Kelly West, the sizzling new star of the swim team.
For the Guardian, Calame named his top 10 funny teen boy books, including:
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams

I'm not sure what else there is to say that hasn't already been said about this book (and its sequels). I read somewhere that Douglas Adams was told that a sci-fi comedy wouldn't work. Oops. There's a lesson there, folks. The book is bizarre, and insane, and shoot-soda-out-of-your-nose funny. Simple as that. You know a novel is good when you can read it again and again and still find yourself laughing just as hard as you did the first time around.
Read about the other books on the list.

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy appears on John Mullan's list of ten of the best instances of invisibility in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue