Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

I'm lazing around in the sun. It's one of those perfect Maine days - sunny and dry, cool in the shade, hot in the sun, 70 degrees and breezy. I weeded the garden for an hour or two, sketched nasturtiums in my gardening journal, foraged for ripe blackberries, and sat on a blanket reading a few wildly improbable but highly entertaining P.G. Wodehouse stories from The World of Mr. Mulliner (Taplinger 1974; I bought a hardcover for a dollar at a tiny library sale last Saturday morning). In his unpaginated introduction to this collection, Wodehouse mentions the fine art of procrastinating:

"Authors as a class are not men who like to work. Just as, according to Shakespeare, snails creep unwillingly to school, so do writers of wholesome fiction slow up as they approach their desks. I myself have probably sharpened as many pencils and cleaned out as many pipes before getting down to it as any man in the business."

Wodehouse continues by saying that these stories flowed "as if someone had turned a tap." They certainly read that way - easy, funny, chuckle-inducing. Finally, a book that warns that you, the reader, will laugh out loud as you read it (you know those irritating blurbs - "laugh-out-loud funny" - when it isn't) and it actually delivers the goods. I was chuckling. Sometimes simply at his use of names. Places: Lower-Briskett-in-the-Midden; Tooting East; Bingley-on-Sea. People: Sir Jasper ffinch-ffarrowmere; Myrtle Banks, Algy Wymondham-Wymondham. I intended to do book-work today, and here I am, feeling like I am scarfing down bon-bons instead, as I consume these stories one after another. Well, what else are the last days of summer for, I ask you, if not for making hay. If I may mix my metaphors.