This Christmas, Ben Stiller's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty hits theaters, adapted from a 1939 short story by James Thurber. If you can get away with some light reading before escaping the dinner table for the cineplex, you might consider Thurber's pseudo-autobiography My Life and Hard Times.

The book was written before Thurber even turned forty, and despite the fact that the humorist and regular New Yorker contributor had “accomplished nothing of excellence except a remarkable and, to some of my friends, unaccountable expertness in hitting empty ginger ale bottles with small rocks at a distance of thirty paces.”

Thurber covers his childhood in Columbus, Ohio, painting a picture of a topsy-turvy house in chapters like “The Night the Bed Fell” or a town gone off the rails in “The Day the Dam Broke.” In that chapter, all of Columbus seems to be drowning in the mass delusion that a fault with the local dam will lead to the entire town becoming submerged in minutes. It's a good book to have around after an extra glass of wine at dinner, even if multiple conversations are going on around you.

Thurber's ongoing amusement with alarm and panic reveals itself everywhere: amid a community gone mad (as with the dam), and a household in confusion, as when Thurber's mother is convinced that burglars are downstairs, and throws a shoe through a neighbor's window to get him to call the police. After the neighbor has come to the window and gone to call the police, “mother suddenly made as if to throw another shoe, not because there was further need of it but, as she later explained, because the thrill of heaving a shoe through a window glass had enormously taken her fancy.”

These funny emergencies can even take place in Thurber's own mind. In “More Alarms at Night,” Thurber is convinced that he might lose his mind over a “trivial mental tic” when he can't remember the name of the town in New Jersey that he will eventually figure out is Perth Amboy. There's no reason he has to come up with the name of this town, but come up with it he must, and he runs through a cycle of meaningless words without any luck: terra cotta, Walla-Walla, bill of lading, vice versa, hoity toity, Pall Mall, Bodley Head, Schumann-Heink. “I suppose terra cotta was the closest I came, although it was not very close.”

Come to think of it, this may not be the best book to have around at family gatherings. Thurber's absurdist bent (think of this as a precursor to Woody Allen's Without Feathers), might have you following in his family's footsteps, tossing shoes through windows just for the fun of it.

James Thurber's My Life and Hard Times. Illustration by Nathan Gelgud, 2013.