The Neddiad, by Daniel Pinkwater

The Neddiad: How Neddie Took the Train, Went to Hollywood, and Saved Civilization

From Amazon: "The old powers try to come back, and the planet is plunged into chaos, and civilization is destroyed, and it gets all violent and evil...the old legends tell that a hero...with the sacred turtle, always...

Los Angeles, California.
Neddie Wentworthstein is the guy with the turtle.
Sandor Eucalyptus is the guy with the jellybean.
Sholmos Bunyip wants the turtle...and he'll stop at nothing to get it."

Despite that rather badly written summary (I felt I had to include it to uphold tradition), The Neddiad is hysterically funny, incredibly unique, and unbelievably clever. The main thing you will learn from this book is that smart people are more entertaining. Daniel Pinkwater doesn't come across as a snooty intellectual, but it's very clear that he's really smart, because pretty much every sentence is a masterwork of comic genius. This book is good in print but it's much better if you get the audio book narrated by Daniel Pinkwater himself. It's even funnier that way.

"“The first thing I saw was an African lion, about one foot from my nose. I jumped … It only took a second to realize that it was stuffed and not alive — but you can go through quite a number of emotion in one second. The emotion I settled on was that it was an extremely neat thing.”"

“If I had to sum up my first impression of Los Angeles in a few words, I would say it’s a perfect combination of glamorous and crummy.”

“Billy the Phantom Bellboy said this was the best thing that had ever happened to him in his whole death.”

Until next time,

Rachel Duncan

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