The British Museum Is Falling Down by David Lodge

'It partook, he thought, shifting his weight in the saddle, of metempsychosis, the way his humble life fell into moulds prepared by literature. Or was it, he wondered, picking his nose, the result of closely studying the sentence structure of the English novelists?' This quote basically sums up the whole novel. Hilarious, succinct, self-consciously obsessed with literature and irrelevantly trampling all over it (the quote is a parody of To the Lighthouse), juggling styles, intermixing farce and tragedy, this book was an unparalleled delight. Parts of it were like watching an early silent comedy; every time the main character (Adam Appleby) tries to start thinking about literature and his work, something completely absurd and ridiculous interferes very rudely and often with wonderful vulgarity; burnt underclothes, menacing butchers, malfunctioning motorcycles, a mysterious American man getting stuck in a phone booth. I enjoyed the constant switching and parodying of styles so much, and the part that really had me in stitches was the Mrs. Dalloway-esque sequence when Adam, instead of glimpsing the mysterious exalted personage passing in a car, is overwhelmed by screaming teenagers running after the Beatles and sees an old lady on the street whom he hails as Clarissa Dalloway herself. Also, as someone who once spent a good three weeks in unsuccessful attempts to obtain a pass to the Reading Rooms of the British Library (which at the time this book is set in was in the British Museum), I was inordinately amused at the part where Adam tries to renew his Reading Room ticket and is tormented by two employees of the museum who are simultaneously something out of Monty Python and incredibly true to life. This entire novel was the most delightful read imaginable.