So I recently finished Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, and I have to say, for brain candy, I definitely go towards the British nonsense/comic novel. Between Chesterton and Waugh, you get prose that just plain burns across the page, no sentence being rudely constructed as mere plot carrier, everything written with such poise it hurts. From the first page of D&F, describing the revels of the upper class boys at an Oxford-like college: "It is not accurate to call this an annual event, because quite often the club is suspended for some years after each meeting . . . at the last dinner, three years ago, a fox had been brought in in a cage and stoned to death with champagne bottles. What an evening that had been!"

The only fault for this type of novel, is that it is so carefully constructed, the happenstance so improbably and yet so perfectly timed, that it eventually comes off as a pageant, and not a novel. Like Wooster, and like Wilde, these comic worlds are pure artifice. But delicious artifice nonetheless.