Leonard and Hungry Paul

I have been wanting to read Leonard and Hungry Paul ever since I first heard about it at a Book Expo panel, and it did not disappoint.

Let me revise that. I checked out this book from the library a year ago, read twenty pages, and gave up. It felt like the characters were...ordinary and the plot was...nonexistent. It was during the scary upsurge of the pandemic, and I couldn't focus, and I didn't want to read it. This time I checked it out from the library, read twenty pages, and was hooked. It felt like the characters were...ordinary and the plot was...nonexistent. It is exactly what I wanted to read.

The charm of the story is the ordinariness of the characters and the nonexistence of the plot. These are people just like you and me, but they look on the details of their ordinary lives and they delight in them. These folks don't have any real plot to their lives, but they deeply enjoy the daily tiny dramas and comedies.

And the story is humorous and it's never snarky humor, but subtle and gentle. Here are a couple of examples.

“Helen and Peter (Hungry Paul's parents) had played Scrabble for years, going back to when they first bought a house together and had no money to go out. They used to play high stakes games of Scrabble, with the loser providing carnal favours to the victor, a system which allowed them to explore both their vocabulary and their marriage at the same time.”

(After little prewedding argument between the engaged couple, Grace and Andrew...)
“‘Sorry for dumping on you...Don't mind me. I feel a bit better just saying all this instead of thinking it.' (Grace)
‘It's fine,' said Andrew. ‘It's good training for when I'm your husband and I'm legally required to listen to you.'“

The other thing I took away from this story is a sense that ordinary people can work through the troubles we face in life. Life isn't all breakups and divorces and nasty scenes. One can go to the edge of these and step back and face the trouble with resolve and, maybe, a bit of humor, and press on.

Gosh, that's something I think we need to see and take in and try and do in this world, don't you?