Pastor and author Douglas Wilson recommends P.G. Wodehouse for two reasons:
“Wodehouse was merciless to pretentiousness, and aspiring writers are the most pretentious fellows on the planet. So there’s that spiritual benefit.”
The second reason? “Simply put, Wodehouse is a black belt metaphor ninja. Evelyn Waugh, himself a great writer, once said that Wodehouse was capable of two or three striking metaphors per page.
- He looked like a sheep with a secret sorrow.
- One young man was a great dancer, one who never let his left hip know what his right hip was doing.
- She had just enough brains to make a jaybird fly crooked.
- Her face was shining like the seat of a bus driver’s trousers.
- He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.”
Reading Wodehouse kept me sane through my three years of law school.
There’s always a beetle.
The president of my college while I attended said he had a reading goal of all Wodehouse novels, which I think he said was in the 90s. I don’t remember how many he had read at that point. 60 maybe.
I doubt I’ll end up reading his entire catalog, but I did pick up the complete Wooster and Jeeves TV series a few years back and watched them all.
I love that series. They don’t stick close to the books, but they are great fun. What I’ve seen of Wodehouse Playhouse
does stick close to the source material, which is mostly the Mr. Mulliner stories, I believe.