By the middle of the fifth chapter I was able to use a knife and fork

I must have first encountered P.G. Wodehouse when I was around twelve or thirteen. It was my father's guffaws and chortles that first drew me to this author. Blanding's Castle, Bertram Wooster and Jeeves, Psmith; I was soon a firm fan. What a life companion. After that first flush of reading as many of his books as I could (he wrote some hundred books or so), I have been rereading him off and on ever since. When things are stressful or tense, his is a world into which it is always refreshing to escape. As Evelyn Waugh put it, "Mr. Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in."

After an uncharacteristically long patch without any Wodehouse reading, I just finished Jeeves in the Morning (Audio). Excellent restorative. But in rereading I realize just how rich and allusive Wodehouse is. He is highly recommended for adults but I suspect that fourteen or fifteen year olds that are good readers, interested in Britain, like a consistently positive view of life or just enjoy light but intelligent humor will all take to him.

In doing a little research to check my facts, I came across this appreciation of Wodehouse by the actor Hugh Laurie (who played Bertram Wooster in a Granada series of Jeeves stories), indicating that he took to Wodehouse at thirteen, so perhaps he is accessible to slightly younger readers than I indicated. From the Daily Telegraph, May 27th, 1999, Wodehouse Saved My Life.

To be able to write about PG Wodehouse is the sort of honour that comes rarely in any man's life, let alone mine. This is rarity of a rare order. Halley's comet seems like a blasted nuisance in comparison. If you'd knocked on my head 20 years ago and told me that a time would come when I, Hugh Laurie - scraper-through of O-levels, mover of lips (own) while reading, loafer, scrounger, pettifogger and general berk of this parish - would be able to carve my initials in the broad bark of the Master's oak, I'm pretty certain that I would have said "garn", or something like it.

I was, in truth, a horrible child. Not much given to things of a bookey nature, I spent a large part of my youth smoking Number Six and cheating in French vocabulary tests. I wore platform boots with a brass skull and crossbones over the ankle, my hair was disgraceful, and I somehow contrived to pull off the gruesome trick of being both fat and thin at the same time. If you had passed me in the street during those pimply years, I am confident that you would, at the very least, have quickened your pace.

You think I exaggerate? I do not. Glancing over my school reports from the year 1972, I observe that the words "ghastly" and "desperate" feature strongly, while "no", "not", "never" and "again" also crop up more often than one would expect in a random sample. My history teacher's report actually took the form of a postcard from Vancouver.

But this, you will be nauseated to learn, is a tale of redemption. In about my 13th year, it so happened that a copy of Galahad at Blandings by PG Wodehouse entered my squalid universe, and things quickly began to change. From the very first sentence of my very first Wodehouse story, life appeared to grow somehow larger. There had always been height, depth, width and time, and in these prosaic dimensions I had hitherto snarled, cursed, and not washed my hair. But now, suddenly, there was Wodehouse, and the discovery seemed to make me gentler every day. By the middle of the fifth chapter I was able to use a knife and fork, and I like to think that I have made reasonable strides since.