“Get your kicks on Route 66” goes the song. As someone who grew up on rock and roll and dreamt of the wide spaces of America from Glasgow, Billy Connolly has always had a fascination with the iconic Route 66. In Billy Connolly’s Route 66, he travels the famous Mother Road, and invites us all along for the ride.

Stretching from Chicago to Los Angeles, Route 66 travels through many famous places, and is an integral part of the California dream – travelled by millions in search of a better life on the West Coast, particularly by the “Okies” escaping the dust bowl of Oklahoma during the great depression. Now however, with much of the small towns which relied on passing trade bypassed by the Interstate highway, the road is dying. Some towns and businesses are enterprising and manage to continue to attract visitors, but there are many more abandoned houses and premises.

Billy Connolly

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“Some are born Welsh. Some achieve Welshness. I am going to thrust myself upon Wales”.

Jasper Rees is a thoroughly English man; born in London, educated at Harrow, and brought up to cheer whenever he crossed the Severn Bridge in an eastward direction. But despite this background, he admits to an “unfilled sense of ancestral belonging” whenever he crosses the border to visit his grandparents in Carmarthen. This is what the Welsh call hiraeth – a deep longing to be somewhere (the nearest you can get to it in English is probably “homesickness”, although the translation isn’t quite literal). Jasper’s hiraeth led him to establish Project Wales, an attempt to explore his Welsh ancestry, to reclaim his roots and to live up to his surname by way of a book deal that produced the wonderfully titled Bred of Heaven.

So how do you set about doing something as nebulous as reclaiming your ancestry?

Jasper Rees

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“Animal in Bed. Probably a Gnu”

Sexually, I’m more of a Switzerland is a collection of personal ads placed in the London Review of Books which have been gathered together by David Rose, the editor of the journal’s lonely hearts column for many years. The collection contains examples that are typically laugh-out-loud hilarious, often sad, sometimes so ambiguous as to represent a waste of the advertisers money and frequently deeply troubling. Sexually, I’m more of a Switzerland opens a window on the psyche of a sub-group of book-loving, self-deprecating intellectual snobs who clearly make up the advertising readership of the London Review of Books.

David Rose

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I’ve long been a fan of Marcus Brigstocke, finding his engaging delivery and intelligent material a breath of fresh air compared with his peers who seem currently to churn out endless clichéd observations on everyday life. “God Collar” is based on Brigstocke’s Edinburgh Festival show that I wasn’t able to get to so I was especially interested in reading this book.

The premise of “God Collar” is that Brigstocke wants to challenge his own atheism; he wants to believe in God but can’t find any compelling intellectual reasons so to do.

Marcus Brigstocke

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We Brits are famously bad at confronting people and notorious for pussy-footing around a problem rather than coming straight to the point and telling people they’re annoying us. For many people the idea of looking someone in the eye and telling them “Your behaviour is unacceptable” is about as likely as wrapping themselves in bacon and wrestling with a lion. But resentments build up, tempers get frayed and then your average Brit does something drastic – gets out the Post-it note and leaves a strongly worded reprimand. And if you’re looking for something that’s guaranteed to wind up the most mild-mannered of passive Brit, then look no further than flat sharing. As the author tells us “It’s not for the fainthearted”.

I was a student for a very long time – eight years in total. I wasn’t thick, I just got a lot of qualifications and along the way I lived with some mostly very nice but occasionally really irritating people. OK, let’s be more direct – MEN. Did I ever resort to the post it note?

Oonagh O'Hagan

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I first became aware of Hardeep Singh Kohli though the Channel 4 television series ‘Meet the Magoons’ which was set in a Glaswegian curry house and starred a bunch of great British Asian comic actors. These included his brother Sanjeev Kohli (the writer of the equally fabulous radio 4 comedy ‘Fags, Mags and Bags’), the guy who plays the postman in East Enders and the father from The Kumars at No. 42. I thought the series was hilarious and I loved the weirdly eccentric turban-wearing kilted Kohli. Unfortunately it seems that only I, my husband and another three viewers who were probably Kohli relatives thought it was funny and the show was pulled after just one series. I never have been good at finding humour where others look for it.

Hardeep Singh Kohli, India

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Simon’s Cat is one of the biggest internet phenomena of recent years. For the unitiated, it was created by Simon Tofield, and is a cartoon of simple line drawings about a cat and his owner, Simon. We never learn the cats name, but we see his antics as he demands food, wants let in and out of the house, steals chairs, and gets up to all sorts with his hedgehog pal in the garden.

In 2009 Simon’s Cat had his very own book. In 2010, he has his second book – Beyond the Fence. There is an ongoing story through the book, as Simon’s Cat leaves home in a sulk (Simon stupidly tries to give him a bath) and heads off into the big world beyond the garden fence.

Simon Tofield

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You could write down what I know about bowls on the back of a postage stamp and still have plenty of space left over. But I learned lots from Sex and Bowls and Rock and Roll. I learned that Alex Marshall is a world famous bowls champ and that Alex Marsh the writer of this book isn’t.

It’s perhaps harder to put your finger on what Alex Marsh is though – second-rate village bowls team stalwart, amateur chicken fancier, builder of bookcases with Scooby Doo-style hidden chambers, and a man who thinks that claiming he’s on a sabbatical sounds better than being a house husband. And he’s a lousy house husband as his LTLP (now I assume that’s Long Term Life Partner though he never really explains it) keeps reminding him.

Alex Marsh

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364 Days of Tedium: Or What Santa Gets Up To On His Days Off by Dave Cornmell is a cartoon book covering what it says in the title – what does Santa do for those 364 days when he’s not busy delivering presents to good girls and boys around the world?

I wasn’t exactly expecting a cutesy book, I expected it would be an adult cartoon book, but having not really paid attention to the fact that the cover picture was of Santa passed out and covered in vomit with an empty bottle beside him, I was slightly taken aback by the first few pages of cartoons.

Christmas, Dave Cornmell

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I find travel writing irresistible. The best travel books inspire me and the worst give me plenty of material for writing damning reviews about just how awful they are. I was pretty sure that ‘An Idiot Abroad’ was going to fall into the second category but having finished it, I’m still not sure. It surprised me in ways I wasn’t expecting at all.

It was pitched as a humorous account of a naïve traveller’s trip to see the Seven Wonders of the World. It sounded like an idea with potential but what I hadn’t counted on was the involvement of two unstintingly irritating and annoying celebrities in what might otherwise have been an interesting project.

Karl Pilkington, Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant

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Thanks heavens for Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer for, without the things that today make the world an easier place to know, she managed to tell the people of the mid nineteenth century all they needed to know about life as it is lived in all four corners of the world. Over three volumes, Mrs Mortimer provided a succinct, if blunt, guide to the peoples of Europe, Asia, Australia, the Americas and Africa. Those three volumes have been condensed into the single book reviewed here.

She starts with Europe asking first “What is the character of the English?”

“They are not very pleasant company because they do not like strangers, nor taking much trouble…They are often in low spirits, and are apt to grumble, and to wish they were richer than they are, and to speak against the rulers of the land. Yet they might be the happiest people in the world; for there is no country in which there are so many bibles.”

Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer, Todd Pruzan

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