A Return to Form ~or~ Kid Brady Stories & A Man of Means

After suffering through too many Wodehouse non-fiction books in a row (yes, all two of them), I decided to adopt a chronological approach to the remaining titles in this resolution.  This meant a return to early Wodehouse, in a tome that was divided into two parts: a collection of related boxing tales and a novella about a man whose riches cause him a number of problems.  Dipping back into Wodehouse fiction was such a delight, almost as though I had been granted a reward for virtuous behavior. 

Oddly enough, I read the novella on the commuter rail during the course of attending a conference in Boston.  For an absurd number of years, I had been accustomed to having uninterrupted reading time while commuting on the train, which was the only reasonable way to access various workplaces.  My new job is but a short car ride away, so I have abandoned the Commuter Rail.  It has been something of a slog to get a new routine established.  While I do not regret gaining back the commuting time (something on the order of at least 1.5 hours a day, and that was when things were running smoothly*), it has been challenging to find some reading time.  One of my colleagues pointed out that my daughter is quickly approaching the age when she will toddle about the house without a death wish, so there might soon be a day when I can read at home during the daytime.**

Everything seems to be coming back these days: the Gilmore Girls will soon reappear on our screens, Mulder and Sculley are investigating new phenomena, and Bloom County has reemerged in all of its glory.  So too did the glory of Wodehouse for me.  To be honest, I could have done without the boxing tales, mostly because I see it as a brutish sport.  The second half of the book was a delight, and it reminded me of the reason why I was reading this in the first place: a twisty plot and witticisms, one of which involved calling a fake South American country Paranoya.  I feel that this is a much better approach, and I am anticipating this final stretch with much less trepidation that I did a few weeks ago

*The dedicated readers of this blog (who themselves deserve some sort of reward) will note that many of my jaunts in and out of work last winter were elongated by the horrible winter that pummeled the Northeast.  Would that epic snowfalls were the only cause of delays.  More often than not the sky would be blue, birds would be singing, and the train would still be late because of signal failure, bridge openings, and other acts of a mad universe.  I don’t envy our current governor his job in trying to introduce order and reason. 

**Why not read at night, the more circumspect of you might wonder.  By the time I am able to take to my couch in the evenings, I have already seen to the needs of: two children, two cats (one asthmatic, one lacking teeth), my darling husband, my adored new employer, my albatross of a house, assorted family members and friends who I have had the luck to remember during the course of this daily madness, and my creditors.  In short, come eight o’clock at night, if everything is going to plan, I am reduced to a slobbering wreck of a person fit only to operate a remote control for an hour before collapsing into the blissful arms of oblivion, until I am inevitably woken in the wee hours of the morning by one of my aforementioned children, felines, etc.