Keith Martin - The Little Book of Sham

Rating: 4/5

Review:
An amusing collection

This is a fairly amusing little collection of jokily adapted "inspirational" and "motivational" sayings which is a sort of parody of things like The Little Book Of Calm.  Keith Martin has included an epigraph from Wittgenstein:  “A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”  Well, this is not a philosophical work and the jokes are OK but often not brilliant, but it's worth a look I'd say.

Some "aphorisms", it has to be said, are pretty familiar, but there's a decent smattering of original stuff here.  I'd say that it's likely to induce a wry smile rather than provoke loud laughter.  To give a flavour, a few random (and clean!) selections are:

"Life is short and often brutal like a job interview. So be yourself.  On no account be Piers Morgan."

"Nothing lasts forever, except sofa sales"

"Idle hands used to do the 'devil's work'.  Today they post updates on Facebook.

Though it may be the same thing."

This is a book to dip into from time to time for a few pages, which will amuse, I think.  Reading the whole lot at once gets a bit much, but I can recommend it as an entertaining little collection.

(I was sent a free e-copy for review.)