HEIDI HOLLAND

Poor psychologists – they listen to other people's stories all day, and read other people's stories all night

A lot of books bought in the pre-Christmas rush are never read. Almost everybody takes at least one on holiday, in some cases just to keep intrusive relatives at bay. Or to sulk behind when old psychic wounds are jabbed – again - by the parent or sibling you thought you could surely get along with for a few days over the festive season.

A psychologist friend tells me it's the same every year. Her patients jump off the couch full of merriment in mid-December, only to leave urgent messages on her dead cellphone begging for as early a January appointment as possible because things haven't worked out as hoped - again.

This is the sort of predictable behavior that encourages some psychologists to act like smug gurus. I must admit to having long been drawn to them as a breed in the half-belief that they do possess esoteric knowledge about what makes us tick. But after joining a book club last year with three shrinks among its members, I realized that a significant proportion of therapists may themselves be hiding behind books all year round, never mind only at Xmas.

Two of the trio of psychologists devoured fifteen novels each per month. Staring at them as they sat beside reading towers as high as their brows, I twigged a sad truth: these poor souls listen to other people's stories all day, read other people's stories all night, and have absolutely no time for stories of their own. A positive outcome of the few months I spent in their book club was discovering that psychologists aren't as self-satisfied as they make out. Their aloofness comes from perpetually living in, or waiting for, somebody else's drama. One of them even admitted to wishing her last client of the day would hurry up and go so that she could return to her novel.

The person who had invited me to join had billed it as an "intellectual" book club, though I didn't hear a single idea being discussed during the few briskly businesslike sessions I attended. It was actually a book shop rather than a club, which used those who were too preoccupied with their own stories to finish more than one book a month to subsidize the voracious reading habits of the rest.

I couldn't believe that out of twelve members, only two chose wine over tea at 7pm. The exception, apart from me, declared his preference so apologetically that you'd have thought it a sin to knock back a glass of red. The contrived dishevelment of the snack tray – bits of leftover cheese and cracked crackers – may have been part of the intellectual image.

What I ought to have joined on my first venture into the book club culture was a group that pretended to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez to justify a social gathering with an aura of intellectual credibility but instead got drunk and argumentative and forgot to discuss magical realism in favour of grittier ideas. Or a club that pretended to read GGM but sipped something soothing while gossiping, a pursuit I've always defended as an entirely valid anthropological attempt to comprehend other people's motives.

As it happens, the funniest book I came across this year is called Bad Book Club. Its author, British comedian Robin Ince, writes about his life's quest to find not the best reads but the worst and weirdest books ever published. The titles in his collection, mainly found in charity shops, range from Hobbies for the Bedbound, Cooking for Spitfire Pilots on the Go, How I married a Ghost and Gave Birth to a Poltergeist, Love Your Leprosy and The Amish Guide to Dentistry.

His chapter on sex books made me laugh so helplessly that tears streamed down my face and I had an aching diaphragm for hours afterwards. Unfortunately, much of what he says is so rude that I can quote hardly any of it without losing my job and quite possibly never working again.

One of Ince's favourites is a book about sexual fantasies. He writes: "Nancy Friday interviewed many women for My Secret Garden who revealed their yearnings, some made flesh, others active in the mind… To my English eyes much of it seems like mad piffle, suggesting that many women enjoyed winding Nancy up, or that everybody is teetering on the brink of a psychosexual breakdown and even when Freud was most wrong he might have been right.

"My Secret Garden does not have to be read in chronological order; it can be dipped into, though I would not class it as a loo book. I would use any loo that had a copy of Nancy Friday in it with some trepidation."

Among the sexual fantasies Ms Friday relates are not only universally bizarre imaginings but several involving other species. Commenting on one such strange coupling, Ince complains:"The reader experiences no analysis afterwards to find out why Wanda should desire to be joined to a donkey in front of a large group of spectators. Did something happen when she was in the school nativity play? Was she never cast as Mary… and so her revenge would be to take the donkey behind the stable and rut and eeyore loudly while the three kings tried to distribute their gifts? Nancy Friday doesn't judge; she is a chronicler not a moral arbiter. She lifts the stones in the skulls of women and is not scared of what scurries out."

This compilation of the world's most extraordinary – and inadvertently hilarious – books is definitely the one I'd take to the homes of relatives with a tendency towards tormenting guests over Christmas. Go straight to page 17 when you're feeling miffed. It's not an intellectual read, far from it, but at least you'll have a surreptitious laugh while sulking.