Customer Reviews

Planets

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Unbelievably entertaining. I recommend this to any friend with a joy for tongue-in-cheek humor. I enjoyed the absurd coincidences and irreverent look at the things we wll take too seriously. I've read it half a dozen times and will read it again when I need to put things back in perspective.

I picked this book up because the author shared the same last name and was curious as to whether a Boylan could actually write. Only Thurber has made me laugh this hard. I have read it at least 5 times and laugh just as much each time.

This novel grabs your funny bone and doesn't let go even when you cry, "Uncle!" The wildest assortment of incredibly eccentric everyday people you will ever meet. Set in Philadelphia and Centralia, Pennsylvania, neither city has been funnier. I highly recommend this book

I have given this book to a number of friends and have learned that those who can laugh at the darker side of life love this book. Find it. Keep it. Share it.

Back in 1996 I happened to live a block away from my local public library & with a voracious appetite for literature, I was busily reading all of the novels they had by J.G. Ballard & John Barth. Alas one day as I ventured to that section of the library there were no more but as I looked to the shelf on my right in the same row - there was James Boylan's Planets. For some reason it jumped out at me and I took in home and read it. At the time I also read a lot of Vonnegut, Portis, Heller, Pynchon & Tom Robbins - Boylans novel grabbed me as much as any of these others had. It even contains what I consider one of the funniest scenes in a novel I have ever read involving a dead cat. I live in a new area now and went to the library the other day to see if Ballard had anything I had not read on the shelf - nope & then at a whim I thought I might reread Planets - nope. Then I thought maybe I should buy it - nope (since it is out of print Amazon is currently listing prices over $100). I can wait & so should you but if and when it is released again, I reccommend it heartily for a good laugh.

Essentially everybody is having the kind of time that the Cary Grant character has in the movie "Bringing Up Baby," and it's all happening at the same time, and all tightly interrelated, yet it's not at all confusing. Somehow through all the silliness, real feelings are expressed and real "philosophies of life" interact. It's very funny and very clever.