Audiobook5 hours
Never Hit a Jellyfish with a Spade: How to Survive Life's Smaller Challenges
Written by Guy Browning
Narrated by Simon Vance
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
()
About this audiobook
The big things in life look after themselves. Birth, love, death-they're all terrifically exciting, but they happen whether we like it or not. It's the little things in life that cause the most trouble. How do you deal with the million and one everyday challenges?
Help is at hand. For the first time you can get intelligent, practical tuition on the level you need it: the trivial level. After years of exploring the small pockets in life's backpack in his celebrated "How to" column in the Weekend Guardian, Guy Browning has the rules that can help you move safely and effortlessly through the micro-chicanes on life's byways, including:
-How to evaluate a bottle of wine (if the alcohol content is less than 15 percent, send it straight back)
-How to get what you want at the barber's (no multipart instructions, please)
-How to stay warm in bed (when your partner has cold feet and steals the covers)
-How to be a fashionista (when your twenty-year-old wardrobe is suddenly back in vogue)
-How to pretend to laugh at a friend's joke (the closest most men get to faking orgasm)
-How to fix a computer (If restarting it doesn't work, turn it off and go back to a preindustrial lifestyle.)
Covering cooking and eating, sleeping and waking, men and women, love and marriage, religion and politics, hedges and neighbors, Never Hit a Jellyfish with a Spade delivers the truth about the things that really matter. With a package as fun as its contents, it's the ideal gift for anyone who wants to live life with a sense of humor.
Help is at hand. For the first time you can get intelligent, practical tuition on the level you need it: the trivial level. After years of exploring the small pockets in life's backpack in his celebrated "How to" column in the Weekend Guardian, Guy Browning has the rules that can help you move safely and effortlessly through the micro-chicanes on life's byways, including:
-How to evaluate a bottle of wine (if the alcohol content is less than 15 percent, send it straight back)
-How to get what you want at the barber's (no multipart instructions, please)
-How to stay warm in bed (when your partner has cold feet and steals the covers)
-How to be a fashionista (when your twenty-year-old wardrobe is suddenly back in vogue)
-How to pretend to laugh at a friend's joke (the closest most men get to faking orgasm)
-How to fix a computer (If restarting it doesn't work, turn it off and go back to a preindustrial lifestyle.)
Covering cooking and eating, sleeping and waking, men and women, love and marriage, religion and politics, hedges and neighbors, Never Hit a Jellyfish with a Spade delivers the truth about the things that really matter. With a package as fun as its contents, it's the ideal gift for anyone who wants to live life with a sense of humor.
Author
Guy Browning
Guy Browning writes the 'How to...' column in the Guardian 'Weekend' magazine. The author of Never Push When It Says Pull (Atlantic 2005) and Never Hit a Jellyfish with a Spade (Atlantic 2005), he is also a business consultant specializing in creativity. He lives quietly in Oxfordshire.
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Reviews for Never Hit a Jellyfish with a Spade
Rating: 3.532257982258064 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
62 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Very amusing.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is a series of short essays (taken from the author's newspaper column) each of which starts How to... and then goes on to discuss some small facet of modern life. The book's divided into short sections of 10 or so essays on a related topic, love & marriage, sport, etc. As with any colleciotn of this type, it has it's ups and downs. There is a dry sense of humour at work here and I found myself giggling happily at some of the essays. Some very good one liners and not at all afraid to poke fun at certain groups. Men in particular come in for a certain amount of stick. If you happen to be a single male trainspotting rambler, this is probably not for you.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A hilarious little hardback collection of 'How to' columns from the Weekend Guardian, perfect for reading in snatched moments, or when you're feeling poorly, or at that almost-asleep time just before bed. Collected into sections like 'Sport and Exercise', 'Fashion and Grooming', 'Religion and Politics' and 'Love and Marriage', it includes everything from 'How to... eat sweets' ('you can offer them first or eat one first, depending on the exact position of the black one') to 'How to... be a revolutionary' ('you need to start with an interesting arrangement of facial hair'). At only a couple of pages per piece, it's a great book to dip into when you need cheering up - maybe not on the train if you're prone to the giggles!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book is HILARIOUS! It looks at the funny side of day to day life.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5I can't really express how much this 'book' irked me, but I'll try.It contains utterly banal, uninteresting, clichéd observations masquerading as drollery. These snippets might have might have been mildly entertaining when in news-article format, but lose even that appeal arranged en mass. It's appropriate that it was published in stocking-filler sized format, because the content reads as exactly that - filler. Apparently the author doesn't think humour should try to do anything new, or even emulate the best of the old. There are many other, more deserving novelty books released around Christmas time each year that manage to be light and fun; this one was pure dud.