This weekend, I read the funniest book I’ve read in a long time.

Good Omens was written by Terry Prachett and Neil Gaiman, and published originally in 1990. I don’t know how I’ve managed to miss this book in the last seventeen years.  While reading, I must have interupted ME’s reading about 10 times, just to read to her the funniest of sentences.

It’s the story of the Apocolypse, if the antichrist was an English boy, and his celestial watchers (both angel and demon) didn’t particularly want to fight in the coming Celestial War, and were terribly inept.

It didn’t matter what the four had called their gang over the years, the frequent name changes usually being propted by whatver Adam had happened to have read or viewed the previous day. Everyone else always refered to them darkly as Them, and eventually they did to.

The gang is the Antichrist, and his three friends. His friends, in the end, are what keeps him from starting the armageddon, to the chagrin of the angels and demons alike.

This book is funny in a high-brow, English sarcasm sort of way. So right up my alley. I picked it up because the praise for it likened it to “a direct decendent to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” (New York Times) , and so far, I have never been let down by choosing books based on reviwers saying they were in the same vein of books I’ve already enjoyed emmensly.

Pretty much, though, I think everyone else should read this book too. Because it’s seriously funny. And how many times can you say you’ve read a funny book about the apocolypse? That’s what I thought.

– “Your Stories, My Alibis, ” Stories and Alibis: Matchbook Romance