2009 books

1) Leo Rosten, The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N, 1937
Over a period of two years Leo Rosten wrote these fifteen short stories for the New Yorker, depicting the beginners' grade at New York's Preparatory Night School for Adults, and prominent among the students is the verbose Polish immigrant Hyman Kaplan, whose singular logic about how English should work is vastly at odds with how it actually does. Rosten added some flamboyance to these stories about the students' rather unadventurous learning of the language, while at the same time keeping the humour innocent and sticking to the point – there was also a second volume published in 1959, The Return of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N, which the intervening World War did much to make that innocence harder to achieve. This edition's introduction by Howard Jacobson unfortunately explains far too much, annoyingly goes on to give away Rosten's best jokes while stating that nothing is funnier than this book, even surpassing Rosten's famous lexicon The Joys of Yiddish. Maybe this negatively affected my reading of them, but I suspect in a different time these stories may once have been laugh-out-loud, whereas today they read as gentle yet rather erudite humour. But I'll certainly be looking out for that sequel.

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OK, since my last post about The Education of Hyman Kaplan and Howard Jacobson's opinion that this is the funniest book ever, I've been wondering about other books that at any time may have been described as "the funniest book ever written".

The funniest book I ever recall reading was probably Cyra McFadden's brilliant The Serial (overdue for a re-read, no doubt). I've also seen Italo Svevo's Zeno's Conscience and Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm both described (and blurbed) as the funniest book ever written.

So what would be your own recommendations, in any genre?

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Today marks 30 years since the fall of the Khmer Rouge, and no one has yet faced justice.