This weekend I read a bunch of Roald Dahl’s short stories for adults. His stories are told in a voice I associate with Thurber: that boozy, 1950s war-of-the-sexes voice, where male characters are only interested in sex and drinking and female characters are only interested in nagging their husbands and drinking. It’s so far from anything I know to be true that it reads like a pleasant escape to a different world, like reading science fiction.

One thing Dahl does that Thurber can’t is plot his stories like a sonuvabitch. Almost every one of Dahl’s stories has a tense middle and a one-two surprise punch at the end. Also, a lot of the endings make you smile, even though they often involve murder. Murder is hilarious and/or satisfying in the mind of Roald Dahl, and once you’re in there with him you start to enjoy it too — at least until you start thinking about how much of your childhood reading was influenced by a man who thinks murder is the last word in comedy.

I read somewhere that they’re planning to release the unfinished manuscript of the sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. They’re calling it Charlie and the Hilarious Blood Bath.

Well, I guess J.K. Rowling already sort of wrote that one.

Try Roald Dahl’s grownup stories if you like Thurber’s writing style or Saki’s black humor.

The Changeover is a soothing read because nothing really bad happens. I mean, bad things do happen, but you’re removed from the emotion of the scene because of the beauty of the writing. It’s similar to the way Michael Ondaatje can write an emotionally-charged scene that actually calms the reader down — although I’m not sure he does that on purpose.

Example from Ondaatje’s new book Divisadero:

Then he took [Anna] by the hand, and never let go of her on the twenty-minute walk down the hill to the farmhouse, the quarter horse nodding beside them, and Anna screaming his name.

The twenty-minute walk, the nodding horse — the sleepy pastoral setting makes the screaming funny. And I don’t see why he would want to do that, since it’s rather a pivotal moment in the whole novel: we’re supposed to feel the horror of what just happened, but you can’t feel it with that horse nodding next to you.

D.H. Lawrence was the master of summoning the landscape to rise and support the emotion of his story. Things were always churning restlessly, reflecting the inner turmoil of his characters. Ondaatje can’t or won’t do that. Perhaps that’s why I can get lost in an Ondaatje novel but keep getting thrust out of Lawrence. It’s hard to walk on such a shifting land.

Right now I’m re-reading The Witch and the Cathedral by C. Dale Brittain, and this is a different kind of “nothing bad will happen” book. In this series (which begins with A Bad Spell in Yurt and goes on from there), there’s nothing upsetting: the only people who die are old, no one gets hurt or goes hungry. My favorite thing about the series is that everyone gets to perform the job best suited to his or her personality. Whether you are a trombone player, a glass blower, a pastry chef or a priest, Yurt has room for you. It’s cheery and soothing.

The books all deal with a hapless wizard named Daimbert, and they’re filled with the kind of cocoa humor that makes you warm and cotton-headed rather than making you laugh. There’s nothing in here to shake you out of your quiet evening: just a pleasant little kingdom, filled with nice folks and innocuous mystery plots. You can snuggle into Daimbert’s cozy study with him, with roses climbing over the window and a fire crackling in the hearth. In the morning you get fresh crullers for breakfast (unless you’ve pissed off the kitchen maid again; then it’s stale donuts for you).

You’ll enjoy Yurt if you like the simplicity of fairy tales, the small sensual pleasures in Jonathan Carroll novels, or mysteries that are easy to crack, as in The Cat Who… books.

I finished The California Feeling sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk outside our house while Gene changed the oil on his bike. I felt cliched all over again: lolling around on the filthy city ground, happy as a hippie in the sun and shit. (I mean, I hope not shit. But not everyone is thorough about picking up after their dogs around here.) The California feeling is all about the here and now, provided the here and now is sunny. You can’t worry about what you may or may not be sitting in.

There is just nothing sexier than watching a boy work on a bike, and that goes double for me. One of my top three favorite books of all time is The Changeover. (The other two, if you wonder, are probably Pride and Prejudice and Hamlet.) In The Changeover, there’s a scene where the heroine sits on the front steps and drinks coffee while her fella fixes his bike. I read this book at an early age and have read it probably twenty times since then, and I confess it influenced my tastes more than a little. (This doesn’t go for all my favorites, though. If Gene busted out some ballroom dance moves, or showed up with his stockings fouled, ungartered and down-gyved to his ankle, I would not be so impressed.)

What I love most about The Changeover is the way the heroine wakes up to the world throughout the book. Everything develops identity and importance, even telegraph poles and toasters, but not in an irritating way. (See Tom Robbin’s otherwise excellent Skinny Legs and All to see how inanimate objects can become really obnoxious.)

Every telegraph pole stood centred on a single leg gathering wires up, looping them over little stunted arms, and Laura felt her way into being a telegraph pole, or a roof rising to a ridge and butting against itself. The Baptist church squared its concrete shoulders, its doorway touching its own toes, carrying a great weight of square, white blocks on its bent back.

You might like The Changeover if you like the straightforward narrator and tingly first love in I Capture The Castle, the pleasant, sensory world of The Magician’s Assistant, or the sideways poetry-prose of the better Alice Hoffman novels.

And a brief warning: almost every edition of The Changeover is cursed with a terrible cover. Don’t be fooled by it. It is your protection against people borrowing what will come to be one of your favorite reads; my own copy has a worse cover than most, which is the only way I’ve been able to hang onto it for fifteen years.

Monday found me lounging in the sun by my parents’ pool, sipping a strawberry margarita and reading The California Feeling by Peter S. Beagle. Self, I said to myself, you could not be more cliche right now.

Beagle is known for his fantasy novels, especially The Last Unicorn, but in my opinion he saves his best writing for his essays. I recently read I See By My Outfit, his book about traveling from New York to California in the 1960s with his best friend. The California Feeling is about his explorations of California after he gets there, and like I See By My Outfit it makes you want to travel around with him forever, right there in his head. He seems to like everyone he meets, and makes you like them too, even the anti-semitic rednecks, even the idiots, even the drunks.

Beagle is also one of those people who has a knack for being in a significant place at a significant time. Or maybe he’s just one of those people who knows how to make his life sound significant. He goes to the Monterey Jazz Festival and sees a newish performer called Janis Joplin. “This one will last, however the music changes. That edge is there,” he says. He visits Joan Baez at her Institute for the Study of Nonviolence. He talks to Cesar Chavez, who “has a very nice face.”

But my favorite part is when he muses about California itself, and the way the land affects the people:

See, they don’t have winter here. I mean, they have a winter — where I live, it’s liable to rain any time between November and June, or all the time — but they don’t have winter. The idea of it isn’t carved into them right down to the chromosomes, the way it is with us.

I am sitting poolside, waiting for my dad to refill the margarita pitcher, nodding. Right on, man. Right on.

Try The California Feeling if you like quiet, meandering explorations like Under The Tuscan Sun, or memoirs written by nice, ordinary people.

Try I See By My Outfit if you like the camaraderie in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, or armchair travel.