Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

I just like Neil Gaiman. I think I once had the impression that he was a very dark writer, and it turned me away from picking up his books for a long time. But while it's true that even his children's books have dark themes, he is also funny, playful, and a bit absurd. In my mental categorization of books, Neil Gaiman goes with Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams, but he's darker than either, and his absurdness is not quite as over-the-top.

So Neverwhere didn't blow me away, but it was a delightful read. It was the kind of read where you skim over a sentence and then laugh two seconds later because you just caught the joke - not because it was obscure but because it was written in absolute earnestness. It was also the kind of read where you are surprised to find that events that seemed written for the joke or the play on words actually factor into the plot in subtly important ways. It was a quick read, which made it nice for balancing out my foray into Borges territory.