After years of being told by my geek idol, Stephen Fry, that I should get off my duff and read some Evelyn Waugh, I finally did.

I was dreading it; I know not why. Wait, yes I do: because I’m lazy and I thought this infamous twentieth century satirist would require me to use my stupid brain, and I don’t like reading if it feels like homework. But Waugh isn’t homework. He (not she; like Lindsay and Leslie and Aubrey, I guess Evelyn is a man’s name or at least used to be until women, like they always do with everything worth having, stole it for themselves) is good times.

Waugh is the classic British humorist; dry, biting, and homosexual. There’s just nothing about him and his first novel, Decline and Fall, that I didn’t absolutely love. This book caused quite the scandal in its time, being a thinly veiled treatise on the lives of the idle rich and the people who wished they were rich enough to be idle. Parties are thrown, modern art is commissioned, reputations are ruined, tea is served, butlers raise eyebrows, and in the end everything turns out all right, if absurd.

I thought that Waugh would butt heads with my love of Wodehouse, who is a kinder, gentler British humorist working in much the same topic at much the same era. But it’s a complimentary love, so I’ll allow it. Highly recommended to anyone who wants a proper English guffaw.

Currently reading: Angel of Darkness by Caleb Carr