I Read Books: Cold Comfort Farm

This comic novel is a parody of a (sub)-genre that’s out of fashion, in which a romanticised rural setting is inhabited by people doomed by love and/or birth (“loam and lovechild”). Flora Poste goes to visit her relatives the Starkadders on the eponymous farm. An unspecified wrongdoing makes them feel obligated to her, allowing her to attempt to solve their exaggerated emotional and/or practical problems.

It’s very funny. Also, for some reason, keeps flirting with science fiction (videophones, a character is a veteran of the ’46 Anglo-Nicaraguan War*)

Read This: For a funny story about the town cousin coming to the country and trying to make everything better
Don’t Read This: If obscurely yet broadly drawn characters aren’t amusing to you.

* The book was published in 1932