I used to love to watch Are You Being Served cuz it was so deliciously over the top and funny. It’s been a few years since I’ve seen it, but it’s still remembered with pleasure. Why are so many British comedies so funny and so many American ones not? The agenda, you think? Always the agenda.

I know what you mean, Cynthia, by the re-reads. I resisted reading Hornblower when I was a child, but my friends and I wallowed in Jane Austen. We’d walk home from secondary school laughing and discussing “civility” and Mr. Collins and Mrs. Bennett. Recently, after the Ioan Gruffydd depiction of Hornblower, I went to the library and borrowed one. That book was renewed several times before I got into it. Since then, I’ve read the entire series several times and have managed to convert the text (found online) into .pdb files readable on the iPhone. That’s a lot of reading pleasure from good writers who didn’t use profanity and who thought that dialogue ought to be accompanied by narrative of more than two lines. They let their readers hear and enjoy the authorial voice. What a pleasure.

You should get the Austen audio books, they’re just as pleasurable.