Allison Symes's Blog - Posts Tagged "p-g-wodehouse"

Do you worry about reading according to the seasons?

I generally don't, though will concede I read more during the autumn and winter. There is just something about the longer dark evenings that encourage getting the Kindle out or raiding the To Be Read pile. For me, it is one of the joys of the colder times of year. (The other is hot chocolate!).

But what I read doesn't change much during the year. I read according to mood. So if I fancy crime, I read that. If I want historical I go for that. (Sometimes I fancy historical crime!!). The great thing about reading and writing flash fiction is one collection can cover a lot of moods in one volume! Mine falls into that category.

I will put my hands up to re-reading Terry Pratchett's Reaper Man around Harvest Festival Time and his Hogfather in the run up to Christmas though but that is about it for me for seasonal reading.

What I would like to do more of though is read more poetry. I know what I like in that line when I come across it but it is remembering to do so. For me it is the easiest thing in the world to reach for prose to suit my moods. And of course the majority of the time that is exactly what I do.

I do have what I call "comfort reading" books and these are generally humorous like Pratchett or Wodehouse. When I want a sure fire bet to entertain and amuse me, these are where I head first.

So what do you read seasonally?

Happy New Year!

I'm looking forward to discovering authors new to me this year and getting plenty of reading done. The TBR pile, unlike my ironing pile, is one where I'm not that sorry if it stays pretty much at its high level!

I'd like to read more non-fiction this year too and expand my range of subjects.

The biggest problem, of course, is time. I always mean to read more over the Christmas break and, yes, I did catch up a bit. However, I'm usually too tired to read for long so I never get as much done as I was hoping for.

Am trying to read more (particularly magazines) at lunch time and am enjoying that.

I'd also like to get back to more humorous reading and suspect it will soon be time to resume the works of P.G. Wodehouse and Terry Pratchett, both of whose books bring me much joy.

Whatever your reading plans are this year, I hope you have a fabulous time with them. I intend to!

Do you remember the first book you chose for yourself?

The first single book I chose was Jane Austen’s Collected Works. It is handy having them in one volume!

The first book series I collected (and still have) was the Agatha Christie series published via Odhams Books. Remember them? The nice thing with that series is it covers all of her major characters from Poirot to Marple to Tommy and Tuppence. Great stories.

The first fantasy book I chose for myself was The Lord of the Rings.

The first history book I chose was Simon Schama’s History of Britain which tied in with his TV series of the same name.

The first comic series I went for was P.G. Wodehouse’s wonderful works. (I don’t have them all but do have a fair number). I started with Jeeves and Wooster, thanks to the fab TV adaptation where Stephen Fry played Jeeves and Hugh Lawrie played Bertie.

I then went on to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. I started with Jingo and then worked backwards to the beginning with The Colour of Magic.

Oh and I mustn’t forget Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series. My local (at the time) ITV network, Southern TV (sadly long gone), produced a great adaptation of these and the books were reissued with the covers showing the child actors in their roles. Sadly Southern lost their franchise and I believe the series ended. I don’t know what happened to the books I managed to collect (I used to be able to buy them from the local newsagent - how times have changed!) but loved the stories.

So can TV and film have a great influence on book buying? Oh yes!

If ever there was a time for humorous books, it is now isn’t it? Something to cheer people up with and I must admit I was pleased to see that sales of P.G. Wodehouse books have gone up during the pandemic. (I hope the same has happened with Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books too).

And of course humour creeps into other genres too, including crime and horror. I do love a witty one-liner from a character where you know the character is capable of coming up with such things.

It is a bugbear of mind that humorous books aren’t taken more seriously. They are “proper” literature and shouldn’t be looked down on.

If anything a writer capable of writing humour should be lauded simply because it is not the easiest thing to do. Humour is subjective after all.

Mind you, the written word has a huge advantage here. I love “seeing” puns come out, where appropriate to the storyline.

Language, and playing with it to make stories, should be fun and I like to see fun in the final results.

I guess this may well be one reason that misery memoir really is not for me, no matter how well written it is. I’ve got to have some cheer somewhere and even a gripping crime novel, with the odd bit of humour in it, will always work better for me than that.

Have you any favourite funny books you turn to for literally light reading relief as and when you need it?

What are your favourite one liners from stories etc?

I love the opening to Pride and Prejudice.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

Sets the scene and the tone. Beautifully done.

I also love this one, by complete contrast, from Good
Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.

“Many phenomena - wars, plagues, sudden audits - have been advanced as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man, but whenever students of demonology get together the M25 London orbital motorway is generally agreed to be among the top contenders for exhibit A.”

Hard to argue with that one! It certainly explains the queues…

A good one-liner usually makes me smile or laugh out loud. A really good one-liner will make me pause, read it again and enjoy it again, before moving on to the rest of the story.

And there are far too many from P.G. Wodehouse to quote here but that in itself is a tribute to his wonderful ability to come up with lines that just “hit” you and make you laugh out loud.

As you will gather from this, my favourite one-liners are of the humorous variety. Which are yours?

Now there are certain things I see as therapeutic - chocolate, classical music, my dog, and, naturally, a good book or several.

When the news is grim (as it so often is these days), a good book can transport you back in time, forward in time, anywhere on Earth (other planets are available if you like sci-fi), and can chill you, thrill you or make you laugh.

Books are wonderful. Doesn’t matter what format they come in either.

And when my own mood is low, reading a cosy crime (Agatha Christie) or something by Wodehouse or Pratchett or Austen is the very thing to help lift it.

Books cannot stop my problems, yet alone the ones we see in the news day in day out, but they can transport us “somewhere else” for a while and sometimes that is all you need.

So yes I see the act of reading as a therapeutic art in and of itself and one major reason why I would love to see everyone enjoy books and reading.

For a book to grip me, I have to be gripped by its characters, but the right book cover is what is going to get me to look at the blurb, the opening page, and then go on to buy said book.

I want the cover to show me something of the mood/genre of the book, to be attractive, and to intrigue me enough so I do pick the book up in the first place. Not asking much. Hmm…. No wonder book covers are so difficult to get spot on.

My favourite quote on the topic comes from the wonderful P.G. Wodehouse who, in a letter to a friend, said “God may forgive Herbert Jenkins Limited for the cover of……... But I never shall!” Book title deleted here to protect the guilty.

I highly recommend the Wodehouse books of letters by the way - there is a wonderful one edited by Frances Donaldson (Yours Plum, the Letters of P.G.Wodehouse which is where I came across this quote) and another which was edited by Sophie Ratcliffe (Wodehouse: A Life in Letters). Both are fascinating reads.

It is some comfort to me as a writer that even the big names didn’t/haven’t always liked the book covers they’ve been “given”.

I’ve been fortunate here in that my small indie publisher has ensured I have had some input into my covers which is something I’ve appreciated.

The author ought to have some idea of themes etc that their book cover could draw on though, rightly, the publisher should have the final say given they know what has worked for them already and can drawn on that kind of knowledge one author is simply not going to have.

So then what works for you with book covers? I don’t like over-complicated ones. Indeed my Agatha Christie collection (good old Odhams Publishers) are simply red hardbacks with gold lettering - simple but effective.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy has Gandalf striding out in bad weather and again works well (I know immediately this has to be a fantasy quest).

The good old paperback has long been my favourite book format. Easier to carry around than a hardback (and certainly less damaging if you drop it on your foot!).

That love was intensified when my own flash fiction collections came out in good old paperback! Okay, I’m biased but it is a good reason to be biased!

The first paperbacks I remember buying were the Famous Five books by Enid Blyton in the days when you could buy books from your local newsagent. Southern TV had been adapting the books and of course the publishers brought out the books in an edition to match the TV series.

I then bought my own paperback of Pride and Prejudice by the wonderful Jane Austen. Later I went on to the paperbacks of the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett and the P.G. Wodehouse books (though I haven’t got all of those. Still it gives me something to aim for!).

All a joy to buy and to read and re-read (a sign of a good book is that is it one you can always re-read).

Which paperbacks are your favourites and why? Are there any you regret buying? (Sometimes you can find the answer to that one by looking at the books given to charity shops. Every so often a book is a big hit and then it just drops out of favour and ends up in said charity shops!).

All books have meaning.

For me, I have a few categories here. There are the books written by and signed for me by author friends. I love seeing those books on my shelves, Then there are the books left to me by my late mother. Then there are books I saved up to buy when I was much younger and which I still have.

Then there are books such as The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey which opened up my eyes to the idea there is a whole story behind Richard III that needs further investigating. Do not take Shakespeare as gospel!

Then there are the books which make me gasp as I take in their full scale and scope - The Lord of the Rings is the obvious one.

Them there are my childhood fairytale books - The Reader’s Digest books here were my first introduction to the wonderful (and often scary) world of the fairytale. They remain a great influence on me as a writer too.

Then there are the shelves with my collections of books by P.G.Wodehouse and Terry Pratchett - the laughter shelves if you like.

So which books have special meaning to you and why?

One thing writers need to be aware of is dialogue in fiction can’t match exactly what we come up with in life. Well, nobody wants to read lots of hesitations, repetitions which are not done for effect (and look like mistakes by the author), info dumps and so on.

So dialogue in fiction has to “tidy up” what we would come up for real. Dialogue in fiction has to serve the needs of the characters (and, even more importantly, the readers).


The truly great stories get this spot on. You can imagine the characters speaking. What are they saying moves the story on and you are gripped by their conversation. That is the purpose of fictional dialogue.

Dialogue in fiction serves many purposes. It shares information. It reveals information from one character to another which furthers the plot. But whatever the intention of the author here, the dialogue must make us want to read on.

As readers, we need to be convinced by the dialogue the writer is sharing with us. (We have to be convinced this is what characters, as portrayed, would say if they were real).

I love writing dialogue. What I have to watch is to ensure I am putting dialogue into a story for a good reason. I could easily get my characters into conversational ping-pong.

So what I do to ensure I don’t do this is ask what does this dialogue do for the story? If it helps in any way, which it should do, it stays in. Else it gets cut.

Great fictional dialogue shows you so much about the characters. In the Wodehouse stories, I can’t imagine Jeeves and Wooster speaking in any other way. The way the two speak (generally and to each other) confirms their portrayal and is so wonderfully done. That’s just to name one example.

Agatha Christie is consistent with how she gets Poirot and Miss Marple to speak. That matters too.

Consistency confirms characterisation. It is what we expect from the characters we like and loathe.

Character dialogue adds so much to the stories and books I enjoy, when done correctly. It acts as a good challenge for me to get it right with my characters too!