Also, I liked the chair on the book's cover. I'm a fan of well-photographed furniture.


Well written, pretty funny   September 5, 2003
 6 out of 6 found this review helpful

"Good word using" was how Jonathan Ross summed up Rich Hall's book when he had him on his radio show, generously allowing him to use that quote on future prints. And the book does have 'good word using'.

It's a collection of completely disparate short stories written in various styles. Hall is an extremely accomplished and stylish writer, with superb, economical use of language and imagery. He reminded me at one minute like Harry Hill: latching onto a surreal concept and taking it to it's most illogical conclusion, and at another like a trailer trash US version of John Shuttleworth finding joy in the most mundane daily irrelevance.

There's nothing really linking the stories together - they all come out of left-field - but through them he pokes observational fun at the Brits (especially Aberdeen) but reserves his most cutting humour for his fellow countrymen...like Michael Moore but funny and disarming. The stories are witty, whimsical and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.

It's a book you will dip into and have a meaningless 10 minutes of fun from time to time.


Check out those meat hats.   February 19, 2003
 6 out of 6 found this review helpful

This collection of bizarre, surreal, satirical, but more importantly very funny short stories and anecdotes is the funniest thing I've read for a long while. Rich Hall's wry humour touches on subjects such as Neil Diamonds love for hard hats, his grandparents nuclear power plant, london estate agents, and a brilliant satirical spoof of Andy McNab featuring references to Dubya and his fight against the Axis of Easy Listening.

There are approximately forty of these quips on offer in 'Things Snowball', most being under five pages long, which as much as anything makes it an easily digestible read. Very much worth checking out.


Hmmm kind of pants   February 12, 2003
 2 out of 10 found this review helpful

Well this book is made of short stories and comic monologues. To be honest not even a handful of the stories made me laugh and I found that the author was just trying too hard to be funny. I only kept reading this book in the hope that the next story would be better but by the end I had finished the stories had sunk to a new low.


Take the rough with the smooth   February 3, 2003
 1 out of 1 found this review helpful

Pretty hard to give this one a rating.

Some of the pieces in this book are short stories. The rest are comedic monologues very much in the mould of Rich's stage act.

Some of it is extremely funny indeed. Other efforts got zero reaction from me. There was no middle ground. The piece about Las Vegas had me in contortions. A little bit of wee nearly sneaked out. Yet elsewhere the chapters were about as funny as an orphanage burning down.

Still, each chapter/story/discourse is pretty short so at least you know that if you aren't enjoying the bit in front of you, another probably better one will be along in a minute.

So the three star rating is very much an average. Some of the contents are beyond doubt five star, but others are worth only one or two.