The Most of P.G. Wodehouse (etc.)

First, as an aside: Last night some friends and I watched Secondhand Lions, which is a hilarious film except for the attempt at moral values in the middle. One of the characters tells another character just to "Believe!" in something. "It doesn't matter if it's true or not! Just believe!" was the mantra. That moment reminded me of The Screwtape Letters, where Screwtape plumes himself on the fact that evil has been able to convince humans just to "believe" without any regard for the truth of belief. The essentially wonderful thing about the Christian Gospel is that it is true, C.S. Lewis seems to be saying. Otherwise, what would be the point?

(Though he seems to undercut this in The Silver Chair, where Puddleglum declares to the witch that he's going to live like a Narnian whether or not there is a Narnia. A point for discussion?)

Anyway, last night I finished The Most of P.G. Wodehouse, a collection of several of his short stories plus a novel. A delightful read. His style draws you in and addicts you to its sheer light-heartedness. His characters are all completely laughable. My favorites are Jeeves and Wooster, of course, but the members of the Drones Club could be Wooster's twin brothers. I love Wodehouse's gentle satire of British aristocratic life. I rather wish someone with the same sort of humor could write similar satires about today's culture. Though perhaps today we have the opposite problem. P.G. Wodehouse slags off his young aristocrats for refusing to do any useful work, but in our American culture we seem to have glorified work to an extreme.