P.G. WODEHOUSE — THE WORLD OF JEEVES

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P.G. Wodehouse’s stories regularly put me to sleep. Ask L and she’ll tell you: she’ll start reading aloud I’m out before the first page is done. And yet, the Jeeves stories have earned a very warm place in my heart. 

They are relentlessly formulaic: feckless aristocrat Bertie Wooster has a problem; he tries to solve it, fails, calls in his butler, seems to fail again, but in fact Jeeves has pulled off a brilliant/unexpected solution. The problems Bertie Wooster has are rarely more pressing than retaining the services of a skilled household cook. You can play bingo with the recurring character types and Wooster’s red-hot twenties slang. So when you add all this up, perhaps you can see why, cozy in bed, I feel content to let myself drift off in the midst of narration. These stories are not exactly high-stakes affairs. However… 

At this point I have read all these stories (having returned to those I slept through the first time) and feel the need to recommend them. True, the world of Jeeves is maybe not the world for those who need a strong sense of social conscience in their reading right now. But if you’re a little tired of thinking about our apocalyptic moment, put a balm on the day’s wounds. Read a Jeeves. Go to sleep.