The Round Robin Letters: The Ultimate Collection of Christmas Letters

by Simon Hoggart

Every Christmas, unwanted round robin letters, stuffed with news of young Chloe's nauseating excellence at - well - everything, the announcement of Janet's cousin's husband's friend's divorce, or the details of Terry's colonoscopy, accumulate on doormats. One day, Simon Hoggart decided to do something about it.He mercilessly presented the most eye-popping examples of such letters in his bestseller, The Cat that Could Open the Fridge, and followed it up with The Hamster that Loved Puccini, hoping he had put a stop to them. And yet the letters, booklets and photo-montages kept on coming. So here, to drive home his message, The Round Robin Letters brings together his two collections in an anthology that will have everyone choking with laughter on their Christmas pudding.

305 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 4, 2014

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Looking online for something on this subject, I found this book via an article in the Guardian by the author which, if truth be told, may have been a more appropriate length for the topic. There is hilarity to be found in it, although you do need to keep reminding yourself that the letters included were printed and posted by hand to long and sometimes fairly random lists of people. I have never received (long may it continue) one of these things, but you do get a very similar feeling from a good many posts on Facebook. (Before you ask, I don't exclude myself from culpability in that regard.) It is gratifying to hear this feeling echoed by the recipients of these letters, even if the intensity of their fury is a trifle overstated.

Where it all falls down is, these people are genuine forty-eight carat bores, and a collection of their boringness after a while gets, well, boring. Perseverance is rewarded with the odd prizewinning nugget, but I have to confess I need a good rest after book one and have accordingly put book two on ice.

But with the summer holiday season in full flow, and the continuing stream of FB posts from far flung resorts showing no sign of abating, I will almost certainly come back for more in the dark days ahead.

[Yorky Caz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gave up on this and not quite why but just didn't really hit the mark

[Louise Culmer · Rating 2 out of 5]

A compilation of two books of Extracts from Christmas newsletters. Appqrently people exasperated by these letters used to send them to Simon Hoggart, and here he provided extracts from the letters, with commentary. While it is amusing for a while, the novelty soon wears off. The trouble is that many of the letters are rather similar to each other, it is also hard to believe how much ire they arise in the recipients. i can understand that it may be midly irritating to read lengthy accounts of other people's overachieving and too-perfect children. Or their numerous holidays to exotic places. And too much detail about people' not particularly interesting daily lives - lengthy accounts of potty training toddlers etc. And the coy whimsey of pretending the letter was written by your dog or cat could, ic an see, be very trying to some recipients. But none of these things would arouse me to actual fury, as they seem to have done in some of rhe people who sent these letters to the late Mr Hoggart. There is after all no law obliging you to read these letters if you don't find them interesting. A whole book of this sort of thing is definitely too much, and two books is just absurd.