Summer Lightning by P. G. Wodehouse

I recently managed to acquire a cold in the middle of July, which made me so angry that I decided that the best way to cheer myself up was to read another Blandings Castle book. This one took a while to get started (usually, I expect to be rolling around on the floor laughing and halfway to giving myself a cramp by the end of the first page), but that might because I was so annoyed. But eventually, I really loved it. There's been a reshuffling of some characters, the 'excrescence' (I loved that description) Freddie has now gone, and instead Lord Elmsworth's younger brother, the Hon. Galahad appears on the scene, with his outrageous stories of exploits on the town in the 1890s, which make whole of society tremble with terror lest they are revealed. I really liked Galahad, I didn't think much of the female characters (as usual), but the plot was as ever slightly tangled and wonderfully absurd. Everyone seems to be tied together with a web of pseudo-blackmail (if you tell him I said that, I'll tell him about how you did this, etc), which makes the entire plot constant totter on the verge of crashing to the ground in a confused heap, but it never does, and continues to be exciting and hilarious. And at the centre of it all, perfectly clueless, is the oblivious Lord Elmsworth, who seems to have control over the finances of an extraordinary number of his relations (I always wonder what kind of people make him their trustee). As anticipated, this book did a wonderful job of cheering me up, though this cold appears to be unusually persistent, and stayed on, even now that I have finished the book, and I have to look for new ways to cheer myself up.