Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Ha!

(You have to know something about the authors and/or works mentioned to get the "joke", but at least I think it's funny...)

While googling for book/author recommendations for fans of P.G. Wodehouse, I came across a library website suggesting that if you like P.G. Wodehouse and Charles Dickens, you should try Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton.  Ok, maybe for someone who enjoys the darker side of Dickens, Edith Wharton could make a little sense, but P.G. Wodehouse?  And Ethan Frome?  Surely this "Ellen" (the librarian making the recommendations) jests.

The other recommendations for fans of Wodehouse and Dickens were just as odd:  A Changed Man (apparently about a reformed skinhead), About a Boy (it's by Nick Hornby, so I'm assuming it's drama), March (which evidently "drives home the intimate horrors and ironies of the Civil War and the difficulty of living honestly with the knowledge of human suffering"), and War Trash ("painted with starkly melancholy longing").

This is just weird.  Or did Wodehouse (of Jeeves and Wooster fame) also pen works of starkly melancholy longing about the intimate horrors and ironies of war and human suffering?  Possibly I've simply never happened to hear of them...