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(image via MiraiSadame)

You know what’s the actual worst? Doing things. Making effort. Seeing an action through from beginning to…whatever.

But people in books have it so easy! They have all kinds of magical, mechanical, or otherwise fantastical gadgets to save them time and precious, precious seconds of exertion. They never get suckered into ponying up for Slap-Chops and E-Z-T-V trays because they have stuff that's actually useful. Here are eight things I wish I could use in my daily, lazy life.

Groucho Marx famously once said: "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." Wise words, to be sure—but what if you could combine the two?

I’m a dog person. I used to be a cat person, and I do still love my fluffy feline, but when I met my husband he came with a dog, and, well, I’ve gone to the other side. Fortunately for my bookish tendencies, the dog book is a well-established form.

Heck, Lassie was published in 1940, and The Call of the Wild in 1903. Yet it seems there’s been a resurgence of popularity in dog stories. I can’t seem to stop running across them. I usually finish a dog book in a puddle of tears reaching for the tissue and burying my face into my sweet puppy’s fur. A great dog book reminds us why we’re dog people in the first place—and maybe that makes us cry.

Here are my favorites in no particular order. Even though the summer is almost over, they will be a great addition to your future “Dog Days of Summer” reading list.

The corpus of contemporary golf literature (All Fore Revenge and The Swinger being two notable players in this niche) attempts to fuse the masochistic game of inches with the human experience.

Whatever worth you might place on, for example, Golf in the Kingdom, know that it has literary links (hehe!) to works on par (hah!) with the green jackets (HA-HA!) of the canon. In honor of the summery pastime, here’s a list of some classics that feature the game of grass and iron.

Wilson?

Imagine this: you’re a FedEx executive on board when your plane crashes and you’re marooned on a deserted island with no human contact, far away from your home. You have to find your own food and stay alive. It sounds like the plot to what could be a pretty good movie, doesn’t it? Oh wait.

Well, we may not all be Tom Hanks but if you are for whatever reason marooned on a desert island, you need to know how to survive. Turn to none other than the Worst-Case Scenario Almanac: History to find the answer. Maybe you’ll grow a beard half as impressive as Chuck Noland’s.