“Finally, in reading the works of Tolstoi, Turgenev, Dostoevski, Gorki, Chehkov, Andreev, and others, what is the general impression produced on the mind of a foreigner? It is one of intense gloom. Of all the dark books in fiction, no works sound such depths of suffering and despair as are fathomed by Russians.”

from Essays on Russian Novelists by William Lyon Phelps, p.78

“I have always been alive to the fact that I am not one of the really big shots,” says Wodehouse. “Like Jeeves, I know my place, and that place is down at the far end of the table among the scurvy knaves and scullions.”

P.G. Wodehouse by R.B. French , p.66 (a citation from the autobiographical Over Seventy by P.G. Wodehouse)

2. He had the look of a man who was just told by his chiropractor that he caught a mind virus, a mind virus which disposed him to the intense perpetuation of pseudoscientific ignorance.

3. Spode appeared as if nature had intended to make a brain size has no connection with intelligence; that intelligence has nothing to do with the Drones Club; and that its members were probably nasty fascist things anyway.

4. “All is right in the world and the universe”, remarked Honoria Glossop with a deep, inner, convincing vigor. “On the other hand, I don’t intend to be callous, but even if I have no proposal, who cares? Because that still doesn’t mean that what anybody else has to offer therefore has to be true”.

5. Jeeves glanced sideways at him and cleared his throat with the sound of one of his bacterial ancestors, which indeed were still bacteria, perambulating in vast ignorance around its own dreadful colony of bacteria.

6. “We are all co-evolved blighters, though people seldom realize they are such”, pontificated Spode in a benevolent, subjective way. “Some of us just go one blight further”.

7. “No doubt, Jeeves, you are grindingly, creakingly, crashingly brilliant. Your brain hardware has co-evolved with the internal virtual worlds that it creates”. Jeeves said “Not at all sir. This can be called hardware-software co-evolution.”

Shudder. Uh, on second thought, I’ll take P.G. Wodehouse

“Loosed upon society, Ukridge attacks life like a juvenile delinquent with a hammer who has broken into the Queen’s Dolls’ House. Psmith, indulgent if patronising, regards the world as created for his amusement, and patiently adjusts it where it falls short of his standards.”

R.B.D. French in P.G. Wodehouse (1968), p.37

“He felt like a man who, chasing rainbows, has had one of them suddenly turn and bite him in the leg.”

“He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life, and found a dead beetle at the bottom.”

“His whole attitude recalled irresistibly to the mind that of some assiduous hound who will persist in laying a dead rat on the drawing-room carpet, though repeatedly apprised by word and gesture that the market for same is sluggish or even non-existent.”

“She could not have gazed at him with a more rapturous intensity if she had been a small child and he a saucer of ice cream.”

“He uttered a sound much like a bull dog swallowing a pork chop whose dimensions it has underestimated.”

“Jeeves lugged my purple socks out of the drawer as if he were a vegetarian fishing a caterpillar out of his salad.”

“‘My father,’ Psmith had confided to Mike, meeting him at the station in
the family motor on the Monday, ‘is a man of vast but volatile brain.
He has not that calm, dispassionate outlook on life which marks your
true philosopher, such as myself. I–’

‘I say,’ interrupted Mike, eyeing Psmith’s movements with apprehension,
‘you aren’t going to drive, are you?”

–

“As Psmith sat in the library with a novel, the waiter entered, and
approached him.

‘Beg pardon, sir,’ he said. ‘Are you a member of this club?’

Psmith fumbled in his pocket and produced his eye-glass, through which
he examined the waiter, button by button.

‘I am Psmith,’ he said simply.

‘A member, sir?’

‘_The_ member,’ said Psmith. ‘Surely you participated in the
general rejoicings which ensued when it was announced that I had been
elected? But perhaps you were too busy working to pay any attention. If
so, I respect you. I also am a worker. A toiler, not a flatfish. A
sizzler, not a squab. Yes, I am a member. Will you tell Mr Bickersdyke
that I am sorry, but I have been elected, and have paid my entrance fee
and subscription.’”

• Something New by P.G. Wodehouse: Pretty good

• Three Men and a Maid by P.G. Wodehouse: Well done

• Real World of Technology by Ursula Franklin: Pompous and sophisticatedly trite

• God and the State by Mikhail Bakunin: Brilliant moments, but largely horrible, sadistic and bitterly anti-religious

• Death in the City by Francis Schaeffer: The 11th book I’ve read by Schaeffer has not disappointed me, excellent

• Crossing Lines: Poets Who Came to Canada in the Vietnam War Era by Allan Briesmaster: Much of the poetry ain’t my cup of tea, but interesting for a view into the art of the Vietnam war emigres

• The Yankee Years by Joe Torre: Fairly interesting

• Revolt in 2100 by Robert Heinlein: Typical Heinlein, brilliant

• The Door Into Summer by Robert Heinlein: A bit more juvenile than Heinlein’s other works, but still pretty good

• Tortured for Christ: An emotional, eye-opening look at the Underground Church

• A History of Modern Britian by Andrew Marr: Fascinating, though sometimes ingratiating

• Dear America by Karl Hess: A Goldwater Republican speechwriter migrates to the New Left among other things in a rambling, dense, and sweeping volume which is often off-base and provocative but undoubtedly intelligent and darn interesting

• Route 66 to Vietnam: A Draftee’s Story by Michael Lund: *Yawn*

• The Dialectics of Liberation by David Cooper: Entertaining, prophetic, delusional presentations from 1967 radical conference, notable for calling out the nationalization of Ford 40 years ahead of time

• Just Do Something: How to Make a Decision Without Dreams, Visions, Fleeces, Open Doors, Random Bible Verses, Casting Lots, Liver Shivers, Writing in the Sky, etc. by Kevin DeYoung:  Excellent and must-read, or so my fleece said

• Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market by Eric Schlosser: Fascinating, but annoying

• For What It’s Worth: The Story of Buffalo Springfield by John Einarson: Great stuff

• Since Then: How I Survived Everything and Lived to Tell About It by David Crosby: Couldn’t wait to put this one down

• What he must be – - if he wants to marry my daughter by Voddie Baucham: Aggressive and helpful

• Government in the Future by Noam Chomsky: Mildly interesting, irritatingly shallow at some points

• The Dead book: A social history of the Grateful Dead by Hank Harrison: Loads of early tidbits for the hardcore fan, but convoluted and hard to follow

• Service with a Smile by P.G. Wodehouse: Pretty good, but not Wodehouse’s greatest

• The Fall of Christendom and the Rise of the Church by Peter Pikkert:  Good sweeping survey with perhaps a few rough edges, but still highly useful!

It was in this room, with its flavor of Oriental magic, that my father in his perfectly unostentiatious King’s English accent, read to me the tales and poems of that much maligned and misunderstood author, Rudyard Kipling…Today, Kipling is largely regarded as an imperialist and jingoist whose writings represented British colonialism at its most aggressive peak. Yes and no. Kipling was one of the major channels through which the high culture of India and the Himalayas flowed back into the West, and persauded me, for example, through such books as Kim, to have more sympathy for Buddhism than Christianity. Kipling was not a Max Muller or an Arthur Waley on the level of fine Oriental scholarship, but he spoke in a subtle and roundabout way to the emotions in the solar plexus, the manipura chakra, and thus echanted a small boy with curious, exotic, and far-off marvels that were simply not to be found in the muscular Christianity of the (Low Church) Church of England or the boild-beef-and-carrots English middle-class way of life.

(In My Own Way: An Autobiography, Alan Watts, 1972, p25)