Appleby on Ararat (Perennial Library)

A very strange and silly book that yet succeeds in being entertaining, despite (or because of?) that very quality. The plot is as exotic and as lush as the setting: Appleby and a small group of Commonwealthers are shipwrecked on a Pacific island inhabited by sinister archaeologists, German spies and transvestites. Although there are the usual Innesian linguistic blocks (e.g., at one point the heroine is described as "being as yet unaware of being obscurely conscious of offence"), the book is remarkably well-written, even if steeped overmuch in Freud.

(I save 10's for Dostoyevsky.) Michael Innes in his usual perfection! Like any of his books, this one will delight you between dinner and bedtime. Skip that blind date and take out Michael Innes instead. He's the hippest, coolest Oxford don on the crime scene. This one features George, my favorite aristocratic dog, as well as a young debonair Appleby in the pre-Judith days. The story starts out as a Robinson Crusoe shipwreck adventure (featuring a proper English spinster who goes native), turns into an offbeat drawing room comedy (with an entire cast of eccentric characters including the wonderful George), and ends up a World War II action-suspense thriller (with full sensurround fire and explosions)! Really, it does!Along the way Innes' dry, hilarious prose drops little precious gems of insight and percipience. If you read Innes with your dictionary handy, you are guaranteed several arcane and ultra-cool additions to your vocabulary in every book. He's a sort of cross between Henry Fielding and Douglas Adams... kooky and hip and very, very well educated. If he is still alive, he is over eighty... and if I met him I would just swoon!