Back in college, my favorite place to study was floor 2M of the Memorial Library, right next to the British fiction section. In practice, what this meant is that I’d spend five minutes reading my textbook, and then grab a book off the shelves and read it. That’s how I read a bunch of Pratchett before it was published in the US, and it’s also how I read an enormous pile of Wodehouse. Since then, I’ve watched the Stephen Fry/Hugh Laurie Jeeves and Wooster BBC TV show, so it was a bit odd picking up P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves in the Morning (originally titled Joy in the Morning back when they weren’t worried about branding).
Because the thing is, I’ve read this story before, and it’s exactly as I remembered it, but somehow Wooster now speaks with Hugh Laurie’s voice and Jeeves is a very droll Stephen Fry. I literally cannot read it the way I did before; all the voices, intonation, and timing are completely different. You know how people always worry about movies ruining books and then people go “Well, the book is still there the same as before”? Those people are wrong; once the movie version is out, the book is going to be different for the people who’ve seen the movie version.
Fortunately, the Fry/Laurie version of Jeeves and Wooster is great, and having their voices in my head arguably improves the dialogue in the book. And Wodehouse himself is every bit as charmingly delicious as I remembered. This isn’t the place to start reading Jeeves books (it’s very late in the series, and references stuff that’s happened before), but if you haven’t read them, and possess a sense of humour, you absolutely should.
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