piffle, and all that rot

I can barely stop reading for long enough to type this. Disclaimer: I love my big, long, serious books and mean no disparagement to them. But I'm reading funny books for the first time in a long time, and holy goodness is it a blast. P.G. Wodehouse was an especially prolific British author, perhaps best known for the Jeeves and Wooster series [Hugh Laurie plays Wooster in a BBC tv series and it's pure gold]. I literally laugh out loud the whole time I'm reading. You'd think that I'd then be more careful about where I read, but I'm still pulling out my kindle (woot) to read Jeeves in the House office buildings. So what if my laughs literally echo off the marble floors. Piffle, and all that rot.

Ok, I can't help it. Here's a chunk for you all:

Jeeves—my man, you know—is really a most extraordinary chap. So capable. Honestly, I shouldn't know what to do without him. On broader lines he's like those chappies who sit peering sadly over the marble bat- tlements at the Pennsylvania Station in the place marked "Inquiries." You know the Johnnies I mean. You go up to them and say: "When's the next train for Melonsquashville, Tennessee?" and they reply, without stop- ping to think, "Two-forty-three, track ten, change at San Francisco." And they're right every time. Well, Jeeves gives you just the same impression of omniscience.

As an instance of what I mean, I remember meeting Monty Byng in Bond Street one morning, looking the last word in a grey check suit, and I felt I should never be happy till I had one like it. I dug the address of the tailors out of him, and had them working on the thing inside the hour.

"Jeeves," I said that evening. "I'm getting a check suit like that one of Mr. Byng's."

"Injudicious, sir," he said firmly. "It will not become you."

"What absolute rot! It's the soundest thing I've struck for years."

"Unsuitable for you, sir."

Well, the long and the short of it was that the confounded thing came home, and I put it on, and when I caught sight of myself in the glass I nearly swooned. Jeeves was perfectly right. I looked a cross between a music-hall comedian and a cheap bookie. Yet Monty had looked fine in absolutely the same stuff. These things are just Life's mysteries, and that's all there is to it.

I know, I know. Brilliant, right? Oh, and here's a visual:



Wonderful.