Twinkies vs. Crème Brûlée

Shopping for light summer reading is like shopping for desserts in a supermarket. Most books are unfortunately like Hostess twinkies, but if you look hard enough you can find a nice crème brûlée or a tarte aux framboises . (Okay, it’s like shopping in a Manhattan supermarket, but we digress.) In that latter category we can put most of the works of P.G. Wodehouse, a man whose prose is as perfect and fine as it is frivolous. I recently read one of his earliest books, Something Fresh , and I can’t recall laughing at a book more loudly and in more public places in recent memory.

So, if you’re looking for fluffy, yummy summer reading, you might want to visit or revisit Wodehouse. And if you have to intellectualize him, read Joseph Bottum’s ” God & Bertie Wooster ” from our October 2005 issue.