How Are You Feeling? At the Centre of the Inside of the Human Brain

This humor book masquerading as a self-help volume is a cartoon guide to your mental problems, and though it doesn’t provide much in the way of solutions, it’s good for some laughs. Shrigley (What the Hell Are You Doing?) is a British fine artist whose work resembles comics usually found taped to refrigerators. Here he tackles such diverse human predicaments as alcoholism (“It is terrific fun of course, but there are problems with it”), boxing (“Kill him”), and self-help books (“It’s hard to tell the good advice from the bad advice. You must guess”). Shrigley’s primitive, scratchy illustrations and scrawled lettering give the book a homey feel, as if it were his private notebook. A few of the short pieces are laugh-out-loud funny in their dry, acerbic British wit, and readers will be swept away by Shrigley’s stream-of-consciousness Zen koans, accompanied by bleak, bare-bones illustration. The humor works best when taken in small doses, but the short texts and doodled art make it difficult not to read the book in a single sitting. (Sept.)