Need a grin? Read P.G. Wodehouse

I've been a huge Wodehouse fan (say: "WOODhouse") for at least a couple of decades. Today I'm rereading A Damsel in Distress, and I just came across a delicious bit that made me drop the book and run to my computer to share.

Here we're looking in on George Bevin, who's feeling depressed. Even the weather is against him:

The sun had gone in for the time being, and the east wind was frolicking round him like a playful puppy, patting him with a cold paw, nuzzling his ankles, bounding away and bounding back again, and behaving generally as east winds do when they discover a victim who has come out without his spring overcoat. It was plain to George now that the sun and the wind were a couple of confidence tricksters working together as a team. The sun had disarmed him with specious promises and an air of cheery goodfellowship, and had delivered him into the hands of the wind, which was now going through him with the swift thoroughness of the professional hold-up artist.

I've felt winds just like that; haven't you? What a juicy bit of writing!

Hate the author, hate her books?

Yesterday I blogged about the disgruntled Twilight Saga fangirls who want to punish author Stephenie Meyer and her publisher for not giving them the story they had anticipated in the newly released Breaking Dawn. Today I looked in on Jennifer Crusie's blog and found Jenny considering the question of whether blogging authors risk lose readers when they post strong opinions. For her part, Jenny makes a careful distinction between who an author is and what that author writes:

P.G. Wodehouse did broadcasts for the Nazis, but I’m not giving up Bertie and Jeeves. Georgette Heyer made disparaging comments about her readers but they’ll get my copy of The Grand Sophy when they pry my cold, dead, chocolate-stained fingers from around it. Robert Frost was one of the biggest [expletive deleted] who ever lived, but “Two Tramps at Mudtime” is still the most beautiful evocation of work and love that I’ve ever read. I don’t want to have lunch with these people, I just want their words.

I was delighted to see two of my favorite authors, Georgette Heyer and Plum Wodehouse, mentioned in a single paragraph. Yes, I realize they were both disgustingly racist. But no novelists have ever tickled me quite the way they have. Unlike Jenny, I'd love to meet them for lunch (well, except for that whole problem about their being dead) as long as they behaved themselves.

I'd enjoy having lunch with Jenny, too, even though we're worlds apart on certain political and moral issues. I have cringed at a lot of things in her books, but I keep buying because, darn it, the woman is funny.

That said, there is at least one contemporary author whose books I won't buy because I can't separate who she is from what she writes. I'm not trying to punish her. I simply can't read her inspirational romance novels when I know she doesn't believe what she has written. I just can't stomach that hypocrisy. I'd rather have lunch with a dozen wisecracking, profane Jenny Crusies than with this one "nice" person who pretends to be a conservative Christian only to sell books.

What do you think? Have you ever avoided a book everyone was talking about because you didn't respect the author?