Summer Lightning by P.G. Wodehouse
Thank you for joining me this week for Book Beginnings on Fridays where participants share the opening sentence (or two) from the book they are reading. You can also share from a book you want to feature, even if you are not reading it at the moment. That's what I did this week.
MY BOOK BEGINNING
Blandings Castle slept in the sunshine. Dancing little ripples of heat-mist played across its smooth lawns and stone-flagged terraces.
-- from Summer Lightning by P.G. Wodehouse. A deceptively benign beginning for what will be a hilarious novel involving a tell-all memoir, a prize pig, a chorus girl, and general mayhem. You get a better idea of the humor in the book from the beginning of the Preface:
A certain critic — for such men, I regret to say, do exist — made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained “all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.” He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha, but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning.
P.G. Wodehouse is one of my favorite authors and I haphazardly collect his books in several editions. I'd love to have a complete set of one cool edition, but there are so many books and so many cool editions, that I don't think that will ever happen. He published close to 100 novels and books of short stories!
Perhaps my favorite Wodehouse editions are the Penguins from the 1970s and '80s with cover art by "Ionicus." He drew the cover illustrations for 58 Wodehouse books. I have 17 of them, including Summer Lightning, and am on the lookout for others.
YOUR BOOK BEGINNING
Please add the link to your book beginning post in the linky box below. If you participate or share on social media, please use the hashtag #bookbeginnings so other people can find your post.
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And so far, in his efforts to win the favour and esteem of his Uncle Clarence, he seemed to have made no progress whatsoever. On the occasions when he had found himself in Lord Emsworth’s society, the latter had looked at him sometimes as if he did not know he was there, more often as if he wished he wasn’t.
The Honourable Galahad Threepwood has decided to write his memoir―a tell-all that could destroy polite society. Everyone wants this manuscript gone, particularly Lord Emsworth’s neighbor Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe, who would do anything to keep the story of the prawns buried in the past. But the memoir isn’t the only problem. A chorus girl disguised as an heiress, a double-dealing detective, a stolen prize-winning sow, and a crazy ex-secretary are only a few of the complications that must be dealt with before everyone can have their happy ending.
