The Ascent of Rum Doodle is a parody on mountaineers and as with all parodies there are people who love them and others who really don't see anything in them. I'm a bit in the middle of these two. The writing was over the top and there were lots of funny paragraphs - I just didn't laugh as much as I had hoped. My expectations were very high, especially because Bill Bryson in the foreword calls this the funniest book he ever read. It is funny, just not as funny as I thought. Sometimes it was also trying a bit too hard to make people laugh. I think I might have enjoyed it a lot more even I hadn't read the foreword and the caption which both gave away the funniest parts of the book. So I'm not saying anything else about the books content here because I don't want to spoil it for anyone else.