The post title is my favorite quote from a book filled with witticisms and wickedly funny satire – Cold Comfort Farm. Think Austen meets the Brontës meets Monty Python and you have a good idea of what this book’s about. I first fell in love with the film version of this story back in college when I was taking a course on the writings of the Brontës, and a friend and fellow classmate told me I had to rent it. We had just finished discussing Wuthering Heights in class, and so fully appreciated the fun and silliness of the movie. But it was years before I realized it was actually based on a novel, and so when I saw a BookCrossing bookring for it, I immediately joined up and anticipated a fun read – and gladly, I was not disappointed.

In the 1930s, young Flora Poste, newly orphaned, goes to stay with relatives at Cold Comfort Farm in the Sussex countryside. There she meets a hodgepodge of eccentrics, characters drawn from the classic gothic-style tales. Watching over them all is the family matriarch, Aunt Ada Doom, who ’saw something nasty in the woodshed’ as a child, and has never been the same since – nor let anyone forget that she was thus scarred. Practical and proper Flora has no time for such peculiarities and decides to set the inhabitants of Cold Comfort Farm straight – and hilarity thus ensues.

One of my favorite touches was Gibbons’s marking of the “finer passages” with asterisks, so the reader could quickly distinguish “whether a sentence is Literature or whether it is just sheer flapdoodle,” composing enough purple prose to do the most effusive 19th century novelist proud.

It’s rare that I want to buy a book after I’ve read it, but this one is an exception. I particularly want this copy, which has quite accurate depictions of the characters on its front cover. Definitely a book I would reread, particularly when I want a good laugh.