#WorthReading – A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore
Tyler Libraries have more than just academic titles. Our Books Worth Reading series highlights some digital titles for fun and lifelong learning.
A Dirty Job
By Christopher Moore
Recommended by Suzanne Sherry
From Overdrive:
Charlie Asher is a beta male, one of the countless guys who survive in the gene pool by doggie paddling in the shallow end. He doesn’t take risks and he seriously hates change. But Charlie’s safe life is about to take a really weird detour. On the day his daughter, Sophie, is born, his wife dies of a freak medical condition. As if being a widower and the single parent of a newborn aren’t enough, soon people begin to drop dead around Charlie. Suddenly his quiet life is crowded by giant ravens, hounds from hell, a mysterious date book with a list of “appointments,” a stubborn old lady who refuses to accept the inevitable, and a wily Buddhist named Audrey.
Why I recommend A Dirty Job:
The characters really bring the laughs! Charlie Asher is our humble but clueless protagonist. I enjoyed the stylized tongue-in-cheek diary entries from Lillie the Goth Girl, and the calm guidance of Minty Fresh, the 7 foot tall African-American owner of a record store with a penchant for green suits. My personal favorite is The Emperor of San Francisco, a homeless citizen always accompanied by his loyal canine “soldiers” Bummer and Lazarus. WOOF!
Fans of irreverent humor, San Francisco and Terry Pratchett are likely to love this book, available in digital audio through Tyler Libraries OverDrive collection.
You can listen to this title here: https://vccs.overdrive.com/media/107282
As with all really funny books, there’s a deeper meaning to the laughs in A Dirty Job, published in 2006. Think of Terry Pratchett’s ridiculously humorous novels about his fantasy Discworld which grapple with real-life issues such as racism, pollution, technology, war, stick-up-the-ass-ness and, yes, death. All the time, Death. (Well, he is a major character in the series.)
Reading A Dirty Job, I couldn’t help but wonder what Pratchett and Moore would have thought of each other and how they might — or might not — have gotten along if they’d met. (Alas, Pratchett died in March, 2015.)
Their books are the products of writers with a skewed vision of the world and, for all their great humor, a sorrowful one as well. You can’t laugh if everything in life is just hunky-dory. Tragedy, though, betrayal, pain and, yes, again, death — these are what bring on the hilarity. Either that, or it’s a weepfest.