Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

The first day I was reading this, I missed my stop on the train completely, had to get off at the wrong stop and take the train back because I was laughing so hard that I forgot where I was and who I was. I don't remember the last time I laughed that hard at anything, this book is absolute comic genius. The part that amused me most is that it mocks my two least favourite male writers of the late 19th/early 20th centuries, Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence. It also makes fun of things I love, such as Gothic fiction and modernism, but that didn't make me enjoy it any less. I haven't read the novels of Mary Webb (which are apparently the primary target of this book), but now I think there is no way I can do so without laughing hysterically. I was a little confused by the 'parallel universe' of the story (it's a futuristic universe, from the 1930s point of view, set 'in the near future' as the note explains), and I'm not sure why it was necessary at all. I think my absolute favourite sentence was 'It was Urk – Urk lying face downward, in the beef sandwiches, with one hand pressed upon his heart in dreadful agony.' Sentences like that had me totally paralysed with laughter for minutes at a time, I literally couldn't read it in public places because I was becoming a personal embarrassment to myself.