The Wheel is Spinning but the Hamster is Dead: The perfect gift for language lovers & book obsessives this Christmas!

by Adam Sharp

'Brilliant, hilarious fun from a master wordsmith - you will LOVE this book' Kit de Waal
'Extremely entertaining and very useful for new insults' Russell Kane
'Utter genius' Marian Keyes
'Brilliant' Brian Bilston

Join wordsmith Adam Sharp as he journeys around the world in idioms, proverbs and general nonsense. Learn unusual insults from France (You are a potato with the face of a guinea pig), how to hurry someone up in the US (You're going as slow as molasses in January) and what they call a shark in Vietnam (fat fish).

Full of fascinating, ridiculous and hilarious translations from around the world, Adam has rounded up the very best of what every corner of the globe has to offer.

Let's get this show on the road! Or:
Let's saddle the chickens! (German)
On with the butter! (Icelandic)
Forward with the goat! (Dutch)

Genres: Nonfiction, Language, Humor

224 pages, Hardcover

Published September 28, 2023

About the author

Adam is originally from Manchester but
has also lived in London, Melbourne,
Sydney, Queensland, the Channel Islands,
the Canary Islands, Nashville, and
Newcastle-upon-Tyne (he’s not very good at
staying still).

Adam has had over thirty jobs (he’s not a very
loyal employee either). Some of the things
he’s been paid to do are as follows: teaching
sport in kindergartens, serving sandwiches in
casinos, catching footballs, juggling bottles,
washing dishes, reviewing music, changing
nappies, and walking on stilts.

Reviews

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Wheel is Spinning But the Hamster is Dead, is the second book by the man who loves to compile lists, Adam Sharp.
If you think lists are boring, then you have obviously been reading the wrong types of lists.
Adam's lists are funny, entertaining and interesting.
If you want to know how different nationalities describe a miser, what the French call a bookworm, or different ways to describe a lazy person (the Irish one is my favourite), then this is the book for you.

[Adam Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

A delightful, though surprisingly sweary, collection of lists of idioms and phrases from different languages. The title phrase is definitely excellent. And among other highlights, I enjoyed discovering that in Spain, Kermit is known as Gustavo.

[Suzannah Rowntree]

A brief compendium of charming, profane, or bizarre idioms from around the world, punctuated by footnotes and terrible puns. I'm always on the lookout for a good idiom, so I was delighted to discover some of these. One favourite that will stick with me is a way to chide a crying child: "why are you giving drinks to the mice?" (I am, however, deeply disappointed that I was not able to make use in the Miss Dark books of the Finnish way to express doubt that a leopard can change its spots: "A Russian is still a Russian even if you fry them in butter")

Some I already knew from elsewhere, but my faith in the author's accuracy was challenged when I spotted a bit of Arabic that had been written left-to-right rather than in the correct manner, right-to-left. So, caveat lector.

[Vanessa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love books like these! So much fun to learn different turns of phrase from around the world, and so many of these were laugh-out-loud hilarious. My two favorites were the French for “my period is here”: “The English have landed”, and the Russian for “I screwed up”: “I stirred the tea with my dick”. I will dip back into this one occasionally when I need a laugh!

[Joel Duncan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Adam Sharp is back at it again with his lists.

His first book was so good I bought a signed book and his other lists book too.
Unfortunately this one just didn't hit the spot the same as the other collection of lists. The other book was truly random, I didn't know what the next list was going to be about but this one felt a bit samey all the way through.

Overall it was interesting and in parts funny but just not stand out amazing like the first book of his I read. I hope 'The correct order of biscuits' leaves me craving more lists like chocolate digestives.

[Jan-Joost Bouwman · Rating 4 out of 5]

if you like silly lists, or like weird expressions from other languages, or the combination of the both, as I do, this is the book for you!
I follow Adam on twitter and really enjoy his lists on there. This book is a compilation of some of the stuff I had seen on there, and it is a whirlwind of silliness that I thoroughly enjoyed. Also somewhat satisfactory to find some of my own contributions in there. (not all Dutch additions were mine, but some of the more obscure ones were)

[Ruth Collier · Rating 4 out of 5]

I giggled throughout this book, it was pretty much everything I expected it to be. Perfect if you like languages and silly words, even more so if you like rude words.
My only slight quibble with it was that once the author put in a joke example, I was then questioning everything. Some of them just seem too funny to be real, and although I could see more that were clearly just jokes, I felt like I couldn't trust the others.

[Mic C · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this book was great a lot of funny sayings. My only complaint is I found a discrepancy where he attributed something to some American thing when I knew that wasn’t the origin. This was about midway through so it made me start to question the origins stories of the many other countries I didn’t know. I took the book for what is was and just decided to still read the sayings and forget the origins

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

this is on me for not getting a sample - I was hoping for something more in-depth rather than a book of lists. this was fun, but at a certain point I realized some of the lists had obvious jokes in them, and since nothing lists the actual phrases in their native languages, it immediately became hard to trust any of this as a result, fun as it was.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's fine. Some entries are quite fun, the spots where an entry is made up for comic effect mostly leave me wondering which ones I think are real are also made up.

It's a book of lists so it's unfair off me to say I wanted to know more about entries I guess.

[Basia Korzeniowska · Rating 4 out of 5]

Too short. I want more!

[Debs · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolute gem.

[Benny Hinrichs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must read

Incredible. Buy this book. I read almost the whole thing in one sitting. Had me feeling like a goof lord.

[Charlie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not really a book you read so much as a book you dip into and read out odd snippets at parties. Fun, but no narrative (it is not supposed to have one). Just a bit of silliness :-)

[Ariana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Entertaining, serves more as cute points of reference for Chinese sayings for myself, although many of the Mandarin translations were inaccurate or incorrectly referenced, I found.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hilarious book! I’ve found two mistakes in Swedish though. Or, at least, I’ve never heard the expressions, and I can’t find anything on google. But I really enjoyed the book regardless.