The pleasures of fiction
I haven't read any fiction for quite some time now. (There was a brief utilitarian time I even felt it was quite a waste of time reading something of no practical purpose.) Having decided to once again read fiction, I wanted to begin with something not too heavy. So I took David Lodge's Changing Places from the shelf, where it was gathering dust for a little over three years now. I didn't know anything about the book or its author when I bought it from a book sale. The thing that recommended the book to me was the recommendation of one blurb, which promised "the cool, cruel detachment of Evelyn Waugh."

And so I began reading with no expectations at all. After some time, my jaw started to hurt because, it turned out, I was in a state of perpetual grin while reading. Philip Swallow of UK"s Rummidge University swaps with the UCLA-modelled Euphoria State University's Morris Zapp in an annual scheme of exchanging professors.

The book's extremely funny, and I wish I can retell here all the funny episodes. Here's one: Rummaging through old issues of The Times Literary Supplement, Zapp found out that an article he wrote for a festschrift was reviewed as a monument to imbecility and perversity in scholarship in the pages of the TLS four years ago. Excerpt from the book ( Zapp in a dilemma):

And my enemy, who is he? Some Ph.D. student I flunked? Some limey scholar whose book i chewed up in a footnote? Some guy whose mother I ran over in my car without noticing? Do you remember, Desiree, any exceptionally heavy bump in the road, driving somewhere four or five years ago?

Prof. Swalllow also devised a game called Humiliation, in which each person had to think of a well-known book he hadn't read, and scored a point for every person present who had read it. He disastrously introduced the game to a party of the English Department at Euphoria, In the course of the game it was learned that the Chair of the department has never read Paradise Regained. Another professor, trailing behind in points and desperately wanting to catch up blurted, Hamlet! Needless to say, that professor who publicly admitted to not having read Hamlet was denied tenure.