Late night reading

I had every intention of getting to work on my "What Everyone is Reading" post. I really did. But, other voices called to me instead. My Boy Scouts are gone, my house is finally quiet, and I received the latest edition of First Things in the mail today. Articles on Wodehouse, Darfur, the Supreme Court...I think I'll just pour myself a glass of cabernet and read with the bedside lamp blazing. I am married to a light sleeper, so I rarely get the chance to read in bed until I am ready to stop. Tonight, he is sleeping on the lumpy ground of Boy Scout camp, and I am going to read, read, read until my eyes won't read anymore. I'll get to those links soon enough.

Happy week-end.

** Added later **

From God and Bertie Wooster, First Things. October 2005:

"And something in his pages suggests "the living God, Who giveth us richly all things to enjoy."

It's a little hard to say quite what that something is. Wodehouse may be our best answer to Nietzsche, but he isn't entirely clear on how Young Men in Spats trumps Thus Spake Zarathustra. but suppose that laughter offers blessed escape for a while from the terrible mattering that possessed modern times. Suppose that Christendom - the deep unity of Western culture through the years - survives best not when it is trying to respond to the relentless thud with which secular history marches, but when it dances a little. And suppose that God's grace doesn't dwell just in the tears we shed at the tragedy of the world, but also in the play of comedy. Wodehouse titled one of his best novels Joy in the Morning, after a passage in Psalm 30 that Jeeves quotes to Bertie Wooster: "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning." And it's true. Joy does come in the morning, and laughter from reading P.G. Wodehouse. That's a small grace, but a real one."