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I’m with you. Wodehouse never gets old.
OK. Can I tell a daft joke? It was the first real joke that my granddaughter “got.” She was about six, and her mother was teaching her simple math concepts.
“General!” Shouted the King. “How many soldiers do I have?”
“Your Majesty, you have 391 soldiers,” responded his top general.
“Round ’em up!” shouted the King.
The General thought for a moment.
“400, Sire!” He yelled.
I still laugh myself into paroxysms over that. Not so much over the rather lame joke, but at the absolute delight it engendered in a little girl who had discovered, and six years later, still loves, wordplay.
She’s a lot more jaundiced at the advanced age of twelve, though. The other day I was talking to her on the phone, and moaning about the unreliability of meteorologists, who’d been promising, and not delivering, much-needed rain, every day for at least a week.
“They’re such liars,” I said. “You can’t trust a word they say.”
Without missing a beat, and with perfect timing, this sweet child said
“Yes. They’re almost as bad as politicians.”
So wise, for one so young.
Simply. Lovely. Post.
It takes an accomplished author to depict a character who might not be all that bright, but is endearing nonetheless.
And then there’s Twain’s splendid essay “On the Decay of the Art of Lying“.
The truth is in the tale that tells the tail of the wag.
A daft joke is always welcome in good company.
You know that’s true. Now that I think about it, it’s surprising how fresh it feels to wander off into Wodehouse. Not to mention how welcoming it feels too. It’s like each story is its own collection of little places you can just sit down out of the way with a cup of tea and rest easy for a bit.
Probably my favorite passage:
The “P” is silent, as in ptarmigan and pneumonia.
I have not read anything by Woodhouse or Pratchett although I see their names fairly often. That is something I will rectify. Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) has captivated me for decades. He combined the insightful wit and humor of Tom Wolfe and Will Rogers within the society that he lived in. Huckleberry Finn was considered the quintessential American novel until the word
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became unspeakable and Clemens’s reputation in the pantheon of American writers began to be erased. If there is a heaven where authors can look back on their legacy, Twain is still smiling, somewhat ruefully, but still smiling along with anyone who had read his words.
If you love Twain, you’ve got to give Wodehouse a read.
Pericval, I will. I have already loaded my kindle app.
I wasn’t sure what ‘ptarmigan’ was. Jeeves, consulting the dictionary, informs me that it is ‘a northern grouse of mountainous and Arctic regions’. You learn something new every day.
I was reminded of a bit I saw that Kipling had said about Mark Twain and had to look it up. It’s from a piece he wrote when he met him I think (I type out of the book it’s in, I hope accurately):
It is a glorious thing to have all of those two other two ahead of you to read for the first time, though.
Terry Pratchett seems to have once later cautioned (half jokingly, perhaps) against starting at the beginning of the Discworld books (The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic — they are very different books in some ways), adding ‘this is the author saying this, folks’.
With P. G. Wodehouse, I’m fond of Thank You, Jeeves, which I think may be the first full-length Jeeves and Wooster novel (before that there are short stories) and his golf stories (some of which are published in The Clicking of Cuthbert and, naturally enough, The Heart of a Goof), but there’s also Blandings and lots of stand-alones.
Related to the partridges without the pear trees.
And then there is the Psammead or sand-fairy. Or should that be psand-fairy?