I was out on my bike today for the first time in ages, just a 20km jaunt around the just-flooded rice fields, and I was thinking about how I haven't been posting much. One reason, of course, is that I haven't been riding much. So I was thinking about what else I could post on and I thought what is it that excites all the Lug Brothers and Sisters out there and of course the obvious answer is books. Lug Bros. World is filled with librarians and English teachers and college students and book lovers. So I thought that maybe we could post book reviews every once in a while, books we've read that we think others might enjoy. And there haven't been many books in the past few years that I've enjoyed more than P.G. Wodehouse's, so I thought I'd start with this Uncle Fred Omnibus.

Thanks to the BBC's series starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, P.G. Wodehouse is best known now for his Jeeves and Wooster series. I've read a number of those books and they're certainly funny and filled with stories of Bertie Wooster getting into more and more outlandish difficulties from which he can only be extracted by the cleverness of Jeeves. I prefer the older ones (written in the 30s and 40s) to the newer ones (written in the 60s), but there's something to like in all of them. Still, more than the Jeeves and Wooster stories, I think my favorite series centers of a Wooster-like twit named Pongo Twistleton and his uncle Frederick Altamont Cornwallis Twistleton, fifth Earl of Ickenham. The arc of the stories is similar to the J&W stories, with the characters becoming entangled in hilarious nets they've spun themselves but I think what I like about the Uncle Fred stories is that, since Ickenham is both the source of the problem and the source of the eventual (and always unexpected) solution, he's a bit less of a deus ex machina than Jeeves is and consequently the solutions need to be even more delicately crafted.

The true pleasure of reading a Wodehouse book, however, is the language. Not only is he skewering the British upper class and their arrogant ways, he's also skewering their foppish language. It's full of dialogue such as:

'Yo ho,' said the Egg.
'Yo ho,' said the Bean.
'Yo ho,' said Pongo. 'You know my uncle, Lord Ickenham, don't you?'
'Oh, rather,' said the Bean.
'Yo ho,' said Lord Ickenham. 'In fact, I will go further. Yo frightfully ho,' and it was plain to both Bean and Egg that they were in the presence of one who was sitting on top of the world and who, had he been wearing a hat, would have worn it on the side of his head. He looked, they thought, about as bumps-a-daisy as billy-o.

You get the sense that Wodehouse enjoyed writing; his enjoyment is conveyed directly to the reader. It's great for the train, great for the bedside, great for a quiet Sunday afternoon.

Incidentally, the titles of the three books in this collection are Uncle Fred in the Springtime, Uncle Dynamite, and Cocktail Time.