Right Ho, Jeeves
Jeeves has some outrageous ideas about how Gussie Fink-Nottle can capture the affections of Miss Madeline Bassett: scarlet tights and a false beard. What follows is a delightful romp through the banquet halls and boudoirs of English high society by "the funniest writer ever to put words on paper" (Hugh Laurie).
Stats for nerds
5recommend
6mentions
6people
2013–2023years
83% recommend17% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- A lot. If you read a lot of nonfiction and are looking to ease into fiction, here are a few suggestions:
- Read historical fiction, or fiction that is extremely well-researched. I like James Michener.
- Read travel and adventure type stories. Personal favorites in this category are The Treasure Island by R L Stevenson, and The Coral Island by R M Ballantyne. Both are not particularly long, and the original is still suprisingly readable in this day and age. Bonus: these are extremely well-regarded classics. I personally find Ballantyne's usage of the English language very pleasant and enjoyable. Stevenson's writing in another classic, Kidnapped, will leave you feeling as if you have lived all your life in Scotland.
- If you want to read something very serious, then perhaps 1984 may be a good choice in our troubled times of persistent surveillance and abuse of language for nefarious ends.
- If you want something light, then go no further than P G Wodehouse: there are many fine books to read by this author, such as the excellent Right Ho, Jeeves, Service With a Smile, or Galahad at Blandings. You couldn't go very wrong with Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome, or Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith.
- If you want something that is easy to read, but still profound, try Ernest Hemingway. I recommend A Farewell to Arms, or The Old Man and The Sea. This counts as serious literature, so just steer clear of this if you don't want to read "Literature".
- LibriVox is great.
As you mentioned, the quality varies, but some are real gems. My personal favorites are the Jeeves stories narrated by Mark Nelson:
https://librivox.org/my-man-jeeves-by-p-g-wodehouse/
https://librivox.org/right-ho-jeeves-by-p-g-wodehouse/
Also, the whole LibriVox collection is uploaded to the Internet Archive (easy to find: it’s one of the top links under the audio tab). IA’s interface is nicer in certain ways than librivox.org due to its options for searching, sorting (e.g., by views), and listening in the browser. https://archive.org/details/librivoxaudio
- Oh yes of course, not every sentence would need to be rewritten multiple times (some may even have come out great the first time!); I think the meaning was just that he went through so many rounds of revising the entire book, end to end, that some particular sentences here or there might end up being rewritten 10 or 20 times.
On Wodehouse recommendations: this seems a nice post, with choice quotes that give an idea of what readers who like Wodehouse like: https://honoriaplum.com/2017/01/08/p-g-wodehouse-reading-gui... (For a specific recommendation: "Right Ho, Jeeves" is available online, and Stephen Fry mentions somewhere that one of the scenes in it "has often been described as the single funniest piece of sustained writing in the language"; John Le Carré was also an admirer.) Not to everyone's taste perhaps, but Wodehouse's talent for the language is clear; he's easily one of the masters of the English sentence.
Edit: The Wikipedia article has a section on "Technique and approach" (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=P._G._Wodehouse&o...):
> Before starting a book Wodehouse would write up to four hundred pages of notes bringing together an outline of the plot; he acknowledged that "It's the plots that I find so hard to work out. It takes such a long time to work one out." He always completed the plot before working on specific character actions. For a novel the note-writing process could take up to two years, and he would usually have two or more novels in preparation simultaneously. After he had completed his notes, he would draw up a fuller scenario of about thirty thousand words, which ensured plot holes were avoided, and allowed for the dialogue to begin to develop. […] In his younger years, he would write around two to three thousand words a day, although he slowed as he aged, so that in his nineties he would produce a thousand.
> […] Wodehouse would ensure that his first draft was as carefully and accurately done as possible, correcting and refining the prose as he wrote, and would then make another good copy, before proofreading again and then making a final copy for his publisher.
- I listened to _Right Ho, Jeeves!_ this year from Librivox (https://librivox.org/right-ho-jeeves-by-p-g-wodehouse/) and I'd second his recommendation for it. Sort of a perfect novel.
- Isaac Asimov's robot series (start with "I, Robot" and "The Caves of Steel") is good, as is his Foundation series. Ender's Game is also good; I've heard other people complain about the other novels in that universe (Speaker for the Dead and sequels, Ender's Shadow and sequels), but I liked them fine. Cryptonomicon is rich, fascinating, and entertaining. Dune is rich and pretty fascinating. Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" and "Time Enough for Love" are somewhat scandalous, but I thoroughly enjoyed them.
Outside science fiction: P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster novels, as well as what of his other books I've read, are hilarious and brilliant; I would suggest "Right Ho, Jeeves" as a starting point.
- It took a bit of hunting, but I found an example of one of the changes.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/jeeves-and-wooster-sto... mentions: "In the 1934 novel Right Ho, Jeeves, newly reissued by Penguin, a racial term used to describe a “minstrel of the old school” has been removed."
https://archive.org/details/p-g-wodehouse_right-ho-jeeves/pa... shows it's the n-word - something that even 90 years ago was seen as a "racially loaded ethnic slur or insult" in the US, quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Then_There_Were_None .
From a financial perspective, it seems likely that changing that word will help long-term sales. I suspect new readers/buyers of a comedy series don't want to suspend their disbelief that much. It's not like they have the historical and literary impact as "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" - another story with a contentious use of the n-word.
FWIW, expurgated versions of Huckleberry Finn have been around for years.
