"Parnassus on Wheels" by Christopher Morley: Helen McGill has spent most of her 39 years of life on the family farm, doing chores, baking bread, and basically taking care of her brother Andrew. It's a full life. She has the bucket. She has the wood. She has the chair.

Their quaint sibling situation is changed forever when Andrew, an intellectual sort with little taste for farming, writes a book and becomes a literary sensation. His success as an author grants Andrew freedom, and he's often traveling the country for weeks at a time, leaving his sister behind to her drowsy, dreary existence.

One day, a bizarre little man named Roger Mifflin visits the farm, arriving in a one-horse wagon shaped like a van. On the side of the rickety contraption are painted the words "R. Mifflin's Traveling Parnassus. Good Books for Sale. Shakespeare, Charles Lamb, R.L.S., Hazlitt, & all others."

Mr. Mifflin is a traveling book salesman, bringing literature to the country folk and the otherwise uneducated. It's a noble profession, and he loves it, but he has his own book to write, and it's well past time he wrote it. He reckoned the author Andrew McGill, one of the few literary men around, might be interested in purchasing his whole stock of books, wagon, horse, and all, for the modest sum of $400.

The proposal scares Helen silly. She knows Andrew would be just foolish enough to buy the rolling bookstore, and the thought of being stranded on the farm all alone while her brother fulfills another momentary fancy riles her to action. She decides to nip the problem in the bud, spending a portion of her own savings to procure Mr. Mifflin's business. For once in her life, she intends to have her own adventure. She intends to be a traveling book salesman, er, woman. Hear her roar.

Mr. Mifflin agrees to show her the ropes, riding along with her for a day or two until she gets the hang of the business. Needless to say, adventure does ensue, and matters only get further complicated when Andrew returns home to find his sister has flown the coop.

Christopher Morley, the author of "Parnassus on Wheels," was born in Haverford, Pennsylvania, in 1890. He was a Rhodes scholar and worked as a newspaper reporter and columnist before turning his attention to fiction and poetry. All told, he wrote more than 50 books, with his best- known work probably being "Kitty Foyle" (1939), which was made into a movie a year after its publication and won Ginger Rogers a Best Actress Academy Award.

A rabid Sherlock Holmes fan, Morley founded "The Baker Street Irregulars," a society for fans and scholars of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's great detective. The group still exists today. When is someone going to start a Churchfield society?

"Parnassus on Wheels" was published in 1917. And to avoid any further confusion, "Parnassus" was the mountain in central Greece where the Muses lived, and the word has since come to mean any collection of poetry or literature. There's no such thing as a duck-billed Parnassus. And you certainly can't catch Parnassus from getting drunk and hanging around with loose women. I know. I've tried.

Mr. Morley was a very talented writer, and he tells "Parnassus on Wheels" with effortless grace, crafting endearing characters and humorously relating the breezy, lighthearted tale. But it is what it is. There's no real weight to any of it. It's a quick, enjoyable read, checking in at about 160 pages, but it won't shake one's soul to upheaval or rattle dormant imaginations. It's entertainment, pure and simple. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

And I could have used an ending with a bit more bite. The eventual resolution is obvious from the start, with few twists to cast any serious doubt.

So, while I appreciate Mr. Morley's prose, I hungered for plot and purpose. I can't see giving it more than a fond two shots.

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