P.G. Wodehouse Books

Not the book I thought it would be but that was my fault for not reading the promotional stuff properly.
A handy reference guide to all Wodehouse's work and all his larger than life characters, although I found Usborne's own "self opinionated" critiques a little off putting... Regardless of that the fact this is a complete dossier of P.G.s works makes it handy for finding those rare ones and completing my own library of Plum's work.

WOW!! This book is essential if you plan to read anything ever written by P.G. Wodehouse.

I had read the Inimitable Jeeves and seen season #1 of Jeeves and Wooster on DVD. I was hooked and wanted more.

Using the traditional Amazon search engines, you get pummeled with the books presented in an incoherent fashion, and as is so often the case, a kind fan will lay out the order of the books for you. BUT NOT THIS TIME.

You delve deeper and you see there are several series -- PSmith, Drones, Blandings Castle, ever reliable Jeeves and Bertie and others.

And then I discovered this book. And you go on to learn Wodehouse wrote well over 90 books -- and this book lays them all out for you in chronological order.

I especially loved the original cover art included for many of the books.

A LITTLE HINT -- THE BOOK INTIMATES THAT SOME OF WODEHOUSE'S EARLY BOOKS WERE A MIXED BAG -- SO IT STEERED ME TOWARDS NEXT READING "MIKE" WHICH INTRODUCES YOU TO PSMITH.

Mike is an unbelievable book and my plan is to cover the books written chronologically from there. I've shelved Jeeves and Bertie for awhile but they're coming up soon enough.

I can't thank the guy who wrote this book enough --- he really did a great service to fans and potential fans of Wodehouse.

Anyone who has stumbled on the numerous Wodehouse collections edited by Richard Usborne knows that their topics range widely, from golf to crime, "dumb chums" like Joffrey the cat to Drones Club regulars, the odd aunt and the odder uncle. Who better then to provide the ultimate guide to everything penned by the prolific PGW? Furthermore, this book is a necessity for the beginning novice just cracking the spine of a first Jeeves adventure as well as the veteran with a merry twinkle, the sure sign of a long addiction to Wodehouse's "laughing gas." If laughter is the best medicine, Dr. Usborne's prescription herein is guaranteed to extend, if not the days in your life, at least the life in your days. But how can such a delightful pleasure be passed off as essential for all and sundry desiring to delve into the wonderful world of Wodehouse?

Even the casual reader in pursuit of PGW will soon discover twists and turns in the path that would make the quills stand up on the fretful porpentine. Where to start with over one hundred books? Which of the British books were published under different titles in America and vice versa? If you did want to undertake the Herculean task of reading all the Wodehouse in chronological order, where would you begin? Happily, Richard Usborne, playing Jeeves to PG's Wooster, lays all that out in a delightful and enticing manner. So put your trust in a higher power, settle down to the eggs and b. and enjoy the wonderful world of Wodehouse.

The average person will never read as many full-length books in a lifetime as P.G. Wodehouse wrote. The bulk of the books are a little hard to find in the average library or bookstore. Where should one begin?

Although I have read over a dozen Wodehouse works, I find myself wanting to know what to read next. As someone who is addicted to Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, I naturally look for those first . . . but what are all of those books anyway? With Plum Sauce, I now have a synopsis of each Wodehouse book so I can pick out which titles have Bertie and Jeeves in them.

But wait, there's more. Some of my favorite characters from the Jeeves books also show up in books without Bertie and Jeeves. Now I know which books are those. So I can go after those next.

But, just a minute, P.G. Wodehouse also wrote other comic stories about other characters who sound just as interesting as Bertie and Jeeves. I'll have to read those, too.

Golly, I just realized from this book that he also wrote golf stories. Can you imagine how funny those must be? Those are on the list now.

So just these overviews are of immense value to any Wodehouse fan.

Hold your horses, though, there's more. Mr. Usborne has also written fine essays about the backgrounds, appeal and development of Mr. Wodehouse's main characters. From these fine comments, you can deepen your appreciation of the stories. I especially liked the reference to how Bertie Wooster is the archetype of the perpetual fifteen year old, done as a nit-wit among half-wits. Mr. Wodehouse's sense of fun has obviously rubbed off on Mr. Usborne, and he makes his essays as light and funny as possible.

Stop the presses! The book is also filled with dozens of the wittiest quotes from the various books that will tickle your fancy on any gloomy day (something that never occurs in Mr. Wodehouse's perpetually sunny England).

Now listen here, me fine reader, Mr. Usborne also provides biographical details about Mr. Wodehouse that add understanding to your reading. I was especially glad that Mr. Usborne addressed Mr. Wodehouse's controversial radio broadcasts in Germany during the Nazi era.

If you want to have lots of smiles, giggle and guffaws in your life, YOU NEED THIS BOOK!!!!

Keep up the old feudal spirit.

A collection of reasonably amusing stories (with the exception of the hat story, which you can safely skip).

However, the stories lack the spark of a good Jeeves and Wooster novel, so you will want to read all those first.

Any day where a person can sit inside and read P.G. Wodehouse is not a day wasted. His artful comic writing is not a thing anyone should miss, whether they have read books from many english authors before or not. Reading at least some of his Jeeves and Wooster stories before reading Tales from the Drones club will add interest to the tales woven therein. A knowledge of the history of Bingo Little and his doings will help you enjoy his many misadventures with his novelist wife, thier pekenise dogs, and thier hideous but very helpful baby. However, the stories can be enjoyed just as well on thier own without any prior history with Wodehouse. The stingy Oofy Prosser, the Scrooge of the Drones club is a delight, and it is even more delightful to see him lose the cash he yearns after when he is bamboozled by of P.G. Wodehouse's masterful plot misadventures. Everyone should read a Wodehouse book. It would probably cure all depression in the world.

It's not every book I say this about, but if you like to laugh at all, you *must* read this book! I can't adequately describe it, but I'll give it a try...This is a book of short stories about a group of well-to-do young English gentlemen, members of the Drones, a London gentlemen's club, focusing on two in particular: Freddie Widgeon, who has loved and lost so many girls that if you put them end to end they would reach halfway down Picadilly (or so they say), and Bingo Little, perhaps the luckiest chap in the club: his perpetual betting habit lands in him in the stickiest situations outside of the Jeeves and Wooster stories, but his guardian angel or lucky star never fails him. Along the way you'll also meet Reginald "Pongo" Twistleton-Twistleton and his wonderful Uncle Fred, in the classic "Uncle Fred Flits By," among other extremely likeable, if mentally negligible, young men. I haven't done this book justice. You *must* read it for yourself.

Who can resist the Drones Club, where the members bean each other with crusty rolls? In this collection, we see Freddie Widgeon, one of the Drones Club's outstanding chumps, alienating several of the varied objects of his affections, most memorably and hilariously in the side-splitting 'Good-Bye to all Cats.' We see also treachery at the Fat Uncles Sweep and other various greedy machinations of Oofy Prosser, as well as the scrapes Bingo Little's incurable gambling habit gets him into. In fact, every story in the collection is painfully funny (I mean that literally) except for 'The Amazing Hat Story.' But big deal. The rest of the book is Wodehouse in top form, and that covers not just a multitude of sins, but all sins.

P.G. Wodehouse is known to generations of fans as the creator of Jeeves and Wooster, but his writing was quite more eclectic and widespread than that venerable collection of tales. This text, compiled by David Jasen (Wodehouse's principal biographer) shows a new breadth to Wodehouse - this includes newspaper and magazine articles, short stories beyond his usual genre (including the only mystery short story Wodehouse ever wrote), and even a little bit of poetry.

Wodehouse himself had an eventful life, including time spent in a prison camp as well as incarceration in a maternity home in France, but, according to Malcolm Muggeridge in the Foreword, there is no diminishment in the quality of Wodehouse's writing regardless of his personal circumstances. This is apparent reading across this broad collection that spans the greater part of seven decades, that Wodehouse had a particular gift and style that remained permanent.

Wodehouse, according to Muggeride and Jasen, was a clown of the highest order - clowns are often keen observers of human nature and activity, knowning what makes people tick, so as to make them laugh. 'Laughter, indeed, is a great equaliser between the impulse to adulate and a propensity to scoren those, as the Book of Common Prayer has it, set in authority over us - which is why, incidentally, laughter is so abhorrent to all authoritarians whatever their ideology.' Humourous romances are rarely the stuff of revolution, but they often do little to support the existing order of things. Wodehouse's stories have depth to them, but there's always an undercurrent that simultaneously admires and disparages the system - whatever that system may be.

In this collection are characters little known even to Wodehouse fans. For example, the character of Reggie Pepper, was the first series character for Wodehouse; however, with the advent of Bertie Wooster, Pepper receded from view. This is a book full of 'what ifs' that the keen observer can derive much pleasure, and much frustration, from considering. This, in the end, is only true to form of the Wodehouse style.

After watching the excellent Steven Fry and Hugh Laurie Jeeves and Wooster programs, I read a few of the Jeeves and Wooster books and found them as hilarious as the TV shows. Little did I know that Wodehouse had a seventy-five year writing career which included plays, lyrics, poems, magazine articles, novels, and short stories. The Uncollected Wodehouse assembles some of Wodehouse's early works and short stories that haven't appeared in other collections and had therefore been unavailable until the publication of this book, shortly after Wodehouse died in 1975.

The stories aren't bad, but there are only glimpses of Wodehouse's future genius and humor. To be fair, many of these pieces were only intended for magazines and were "disposable," in a sense. The short article on advertising, for instance, was probably funny at the time (circa 1909) but doesn't compare to Dorothy Sayers's scathingly funny indictment of the advertising profession in her Murder Must Advertise.

A few of the short stories in The Uncollected Wodehouse, on the other hand, are still quite funny. You can visualize the chaos of nineteen baskets each containing a pug dog arriving at the door of the very proper Colonel Reynolds in When Papa Swore in Hindustani. And Reggie Pepper in The Test Case is funny enough as a precursor to Bertie Wooster that it would be worthwhile tracking down the other six stories he appeared in.

These collected writings, of various sorts, while not the cream of the Wodehouse crop, are still Wodehouse. As such, they are still superior to roughly 95% of everything else written in a humorous vein. What's more, taken as a whole, they show the evolution of Wodehouse's writing from schoolboy days into his prime. And, some of them are, in fact, gems.

Not, perhaps, the book with which to makes one's acquaintance with Wodehouse, but a worthy addition to the published Wodehouse collection.

When the wary reader encounters "The Uncollected So-and-So", he is wise to keep a tight grip on his billfold. He may suspect that what has gone uncollected may have been left lying about for good reason and perhaps should have been placed in the hands of a "collector" of a kind other than literary.

Happily, P. G. Wodehouse inspires no such fears. One might say that, while some Wodehouse is better than others, none is worse. Though falling largely into the second class, the pieces in this modest volume lack nothing of the familiar Plumsian delight.

The historically minded will find the very first writing for which Plum received pay ("Some Aspects of Game-Captaincy", in which the terms "blot" and "excrescence" are coupled in the way that would someday rolling trippingly off the tongues of Bertie Wooster's aunts), his first appearance in Punch ("An Unfinished Collection", the prelude to many a future collecting mania), his first published short story ("When Papa Swore in Hindustani", where, not for the last time, a recalcitrant father learns the hidden virtues of his daughter's beau) and his first butler story ("The Good Angel", whose Keggs misplaces his h's and lacks Jeeves' nobility of spirit but nonetheless applies a keen understanding of the psychology of the individual to reunite young hearts separated by an interloping poet).

There are, in all, fourteen stories, none likely to be familiar to even the most assiduous Wodehousian, and fifteen occasional items from newspapers, including a couple of poems. The non-stories ("nonfiction" would be distinctly not le mot juste) are very slight (averaging only two pages each), and some depend on topical references for their humor. They are best enjoyed as bon-bons between the more substantial fare.

Wodehouse unfortunately stopped writing a few years ago. Editors must now fish into the barrel for new entertainments. It is our good fortune that this particular barrel has no bottom.

Wodehouse at his comic, yet startlingly thoughtful best. Although it doesn't have the familiarity of a Jeeves-Wooster dynamic, this book hums with dramatic tension & comedy of the 1940s romantic comedy genre. A treasure, a gem - a must-have for any Wodehouse devotee.

Sally is the neatest gal ever! I'm in the middle of the book, but so far Sally has been an absolute pippin. This is one of the ultimate feel-good books; Wodehouse at the top of his form.

I may change my mind about it after I read more, but I doubt it...

Arch

Not my favorite Wodehouse but still very good. No fan of P.G. the Great will be disappointed in this one. For those who have yet to discover the most prolific and delightful writer in the English language, "P.G. Wodehouse: Five Complete Novels" is a better place to start.

Anyone who says God starts to make toads and end up with theater producers get's my snap of approval! I received this book in college and it's falling apart thanks to many times I've read it. Yeah, I love Bolton, Wodehouse and Kern... yeah, I love theater... yeah, I love laughing out loud when I read a book - well here's the book - a triple threat! C'mon fellas - we need some new copies!!!

P.G. Wodehouse was often quoted as saying that his novels and stories were musical comedy without the music. Just how much this is true becomes apparent from reading his autobiographical book _Bring on the Girls_ (co-written with his musical theater partner, Guy Bolton). Although Wodehouse is now known for the 80-plus novels he wrote over his life starring such wonderful characters as Bertie Wooster and his manservant Jeeves, in the 1920s, Wodehouse was better known as a lyricist for a string of hit Broadway plays to which Bolton wrote the book (the play itself or the story) and Jerome Kern wrote the music. One New York critic thought so much of this trio that he wrote his own lyrics in praise:

This is the trio of musical fame,
Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern:
Better than anyone else you can name,
Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern.
Nobody knows what on earth they'be been bitten by:
All I can say is I mean to get lit an' buy
Orchestra seats for the next one that's written by
Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern.

It's slightly difficult for us today to understand the Broadway of the 20s, because shows today take millions of dollars to stage and are usually remakes of movies. In the heyday of this trio, though, it only took $50k to stage one of their productions, and often this musical would move on to Hollywood or into one of Wodehouse's novels after it's run was done.

The book itself reads like one of Wodehouse's best, as it focuses often on humorous anecdotes of the flamboyant characters of the time like Flo Ziegfield (he of Follies fame) and Col. Savage (who used to trick authors to work on his boat under the pretense of listening to their ideas for new plays). You can also get a glimpse into the stock market bubble of the time as Wodehouse and Bolton get all set to produce their own plays right before the crash. Of course, this is a Wodehouse book, so the text doesn't linger on the tragedy but instead focuses on how Wodehouse and Bolton both move on to Hollywood from there, making a silk purse out of a pork belly.

"The Master," P.G. Wodehouse's very apt nickname, is in top form of this non-fiction account (well, I suspect there are a few embellishments) of his early days as a Broadway and off-Broadway lyricist. Working with the great Guy Bolton (they have a wonderful and witty relationship), and later joined by none other than Jerome Kern, the duo/trio face stubborn producers, a demand for formulaic story lines, a few prima donnas and prima dons, and the usual obstacle of financing. Wodehouse, who, as always, is a complete pleasure to read, marvelously chronicles their successes and failures.

Although a tad misogynistic by today's standards, the description of the lot of the chorus girls (from which comes the title) reveals the hard life of the era, even before the Depression. The "Common Reader" edition of the book includes 16 pages of photos, including George and Ira Gershwin, Noel Coward, Charlie Chaplain, W.C. Fields. Gertrude Lawrence, Ethel Merman, and many more involved with Wodehouse and Bolton. With a list like that, it's clear that the struggling team made it big, both on Broadway and "across the pond."

This is a breezy, witty, and informative account of the American theatre's early years, as it transformed from vaudeville into, eventually, the musical, as we know it today. Filled with shams and shenanigans, it sometimes has the flavor of the "lowlife" portraits of A. J. Liebling, but with a lot more of the trappings and triumphs of showbiz.

An astonishing tour of 400 years of laughs from the USA, UK, Canada, and Australia. Not just the greats like Wodehouse, Twain, and Garrison Keillor but brilliant (but now forgotten) writers, plus cult favorites like Auberon Waugh, Stella Gibbons and P.J. O'Rourke. Highly recommended.

This book of humorous snippets is at least selected by Frank Muir, which makes a change from John Carey. Frank Muir is an elegant and extremely witty and ingenious virtuoso of the English himself, but I still have to wonder what the possible purpose can be of a farrago of miscellaneous excerpts from different authors. I could have understood collecting a nosegay of the witticisms of some particular writer or of some specific school of writing, but this lengthy tome takes in Smollett, Goldsmith, Poe, Jerome K Jerome, Dylan Thomas, Evelyn Waugh and Beryl Bainbridge, to name but a few. The most astonishing absentee is Oscar Wilde, but some of Bernard Shaw's musical, theatrical and artistic reviews are here. I welcome those thoroughly, as I do the excerpt from a review by Macaulay, but where, I wonder, is A E Housman, whose excoriations of his fellow scholars surpass either of them not only in forcefulness but for sheer hilarity. Otherwise the roll-call of the humorous includes many who are predictable, in no adverse sense. I would certainly have expected to find Dorothy Parker, H L Mencken and Mark Twain, for instance, and so I do. Not all the items chosen are from specific authors - the satirical magazine Private Eye is represented, partly by Auberon Waugh under his own name but also by the spoof diaries and letters of the prime ministerial spouses Mrs Wilson and Mr Thatcher, which are anonymous and may be co-operative efforts. Certain other press series are officially under nicknames, but we all know that Beachcomber in the Daily Express was J B Morton, and that Myles Na Gopaleen of the Irish Times is Brian O Nuallain (aka O'Nolan). The authorship of the Peter Simple column in the Daily Telegraph changed from Colin Welch to Michael Wharton, and not to its advantage in general, but the excerpts here are actually the funniest things that I spotted in the whole book, and I imagine they are the work of the former. His maverick right-wing politics are not my own, but I used to find his stuff irresistible. Other contributors are not household names, possibly not even in their own households, but I would certainly have expected such eminent men of letters as Muir himself and the syndics of the Oxford University Press to have known among them that Humphry Berkeley spelt his first name thus and not `Humphrey'.

In general don't expect to roll in too many aisles. This is an anthology of good-quality humorous prose, not a book of gag-lines and one-liners. You may spot here and there, as I did, the occasional piece that is to your particular liking, whether a treasured recollection or even, if we are lucky, something new to us. I was never much of an enthusiast for Punch in general (except when it was edited by Muggeridge) nor of Basil Boothroyd in particular, but I applaud heartily his scathing comments on the programme-notes of a classical concert he attended, and the poke in the eye he administers not so much to Beethoven himself as to his hagiographers who have done so much to distort people's view of music in general. This was a lucky find - I do not pretend to have read the whole massive book nor do I ever propose to do so, nor indeed can I imagine who ever will. I still fail completely to envisage the readership of a work like this, and I would guess its future belongs mainly on the shelves of the more traditionally-minded libraries and in the hands of browsers in second-hand bookshops searching for curiosities.

Alas, Muir probably had no option but to contribute a preface devoted to the doomed enterprise of trying to define and categorise humour. I find such stuff virtually unreadable, but for all I know it may have value to earnest students of Eng Lit and their instructors, if that is any word for them. I hope they paid Muir well for it, because if they were going to set about such a fatuous project as this in the first place they were lucky to have him. It is all good quality, I make no bones about that. I make a whole ossiary of bones about putting out such a ridiculous publication to begin with, but making allowance for personal prejudice and individual temperament I can, and perhaps ought to, award it four stars.

Key words in the title: humorous prose. Sure, by sticking to prose, Muir had to eliminate comic masters like W.S. Gilbert, , Preston Sturges, the Pythons, & Bernard Shaw (actually, some of Shaw's great criticism makes it in). But when it comes to humorous prose, this book is the Grand Tour. For the time period it covers, this book has everything. I guarantee you'll discover a new favorite author within a week of buying this tome (and that's the highest purpose of an anthology - giving the reader a new favorite). Muir's editorial introductions and insertions are both enlightening and entertaining, and the man's genuine love of the form shines through in each passage. My only complaint? The book needs updating. Add a hundred pages, and stick in stuff from Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Carl Hiaasen, Tom Robbins, David Lodge, even Helen Fielding. Aside from that, the book is perfect. May a higher power bless Muir for doing such a great and important service to both the readers of this anthology and the writers whose work fills its pages.

A good deal of the plot in this beautiful little tome was borrowed from "Uncle Fred in the Springtime," only this time we've got a paperweight collector, rather than a scarab collector. We also have as a twist to the plot the addition of a detective novelist who isn't quite as he seems to several players; this, too, was highlighted in "UFitS." The paperweight, however, is purloined with the full approval of the owner, unlike the scarab.

Wodehouse's novels of the 60s, in my opinion, while excellent on their own, pale somewhat in comparison to his work from the first half of the century. This book is even more dated by Wodehouse's insistence on including "contemporary" references - how many younger readers will understand the "Ben Casey" reference? However, this 1967 outing will make a sparkling addition to any reader's bookshelf.

This is classic P.G. Wodehouse - love it or hate it accordingly. However, prospective readers should know that this was also published as "Company for Henry"

Wodehouse never seems to run out of plots, amusing characters, and hilarious diologue! "The Purloined Paperweight" is no exception. Revolving around an antique 18th century paperweight, collector with a mania for 18th century French paperweights, and the usual light romantic interests between several other characters, this book is sure amusement for several hours. As always with Wodehouse--be prepared to laugh!

This one-off novel, dating from 1948, follows just after a Jeeves novel, Joy in the Morning (1947), a Blandings saga, Full Moon (1947), and just before the excellent Uncle Dynamite (1948) and another Wooster, The Mating Season (1949). Arguably, it stems from the era of Wodehouse at the top of his form. Nevertheless, it seems to be pieced together from a musical comedy, with one of the longest and most unconvincing love scenes in his ouvre, a thin and unlikely plot, and the happy ending repeatedly dished so many times that the deus ex machina tie up seems almost anticlimactic when it comes.

Those would be major problems for most writers, but they are merely small oversights for Wodehouse, since this book yet contains some of his best sustained scenes and most quoted lines. Wodehouse liked it well enough to rehash it as The Old Reliable in 1951. It's almost a Blandings Castle novel, with Lord Shortlands instead of Emsworth, but with far more dialogue, as if written for the stage. Even after the main characters exit to the altar or registry, there are enough loose ends left to fill another novel, which likely suggested The Old Reliable. Not top drawer PGW, but a readable light novel just the same.

Written in P.G.W's inimitable style, Spring Fever has as its principle characters a young man who looks like a greek god and has brains too ( Note: Brains preferring to ignore gentlemen with drop-dead-handsome good looks), a girl with equally good looks but not so sharp a brain, another young man with neither the looks mentioned above nor the brains, also mentioned above, and a Lord, given to uttering sudden exclamations, and not so given to contributing intelligent ideas to any conversation involving himself. Add to this lot of players a daughter hell-bent on keeping her father, the afore mentioned Lord, in proper discipline, a dashing butler with a cunning mind, and a stamp collector husband and you get a simply riotous tale. This tale, as every Wodehouse tale, has his usual ingredients - engagements between 'ladies' and 'gentlemen' being solemnised in every other chapter and broken in the very next, an amazing array of problems being solved equally amazingly as yet another amazin array of P. comes up. Simply lovely. Wodehouse ranks right up there with the best.

"Spring Fever" is a classic example of P.G. Wodehouse's inimitable style, a story so convoluted in concoction that it actually works. The story begins when Stanwood Cobbold, a millionaire heir with a face like a hippo, is sent to London by his father to keep him from marrying a Hollywood actress. He is escorted by his valet and reformed thief, Augustus Robb, and his friend, Mike Cardinal, the Hollywood agent with the face of a Greek god. Throw into the mix Lord Shortlands, a destitute earl who longs for two hundred pounds so he can marry his cook, his daughter Teresa who wants nothing to do with Mike Cardinal, and his butler who also wants to marry the cook and will stop at nothing to woo her away from Lord Shortlands.

All of the troubles and concerns of these characters intertwine when Stanwood is meant to visit Lord Shortlands at his castle. However, his Hollywood paramour has just arrived in London, and he doesn't want to leave her. Mike Cardinal agrees to visit the castle pretending to be Stanwood so that he can woo Teresa, with her and her father the only ones in the know. But when Mervyn Spink (Lord Shortland's conniving butler) catches on, he springs a plot of pretense of his own involving the real Stanwood Cobbold. As the story progresses, more and more lies need to be told until the reader is uncertain as to how any of this can be wrapped up with all characters satisfied.

"Spring Fever" is a classic comic novel from P.G. Wodehouse. It is a time capsule of a particular era and a portrait of the strictures of British high (although a little cash-strapped) society. Its humor manages to transcend time and tradition, making Wodehouse's writing truly timeless.

Usual entertaining story from Wodehouse, typical slightly far fetched plot but the experienced reader of Wodehouse ignores this to revel in the rollicking good humour of his magnificent prose and comic scenarios.

It was utterly hilarious, a marvelous read when you are in the mood for somehing light and frothy.

Upper class Sam Marlowe is bitten by a small dog and smitten by its cute, but ditzy redhead owner.

This is not the funniest thing the Master ever wrote, but it is certainly better than some of his. It takes the novel a few chapters to really get going on the laughs. The first part of the book is amusing; The second part is laugh out loud funny, with some genuine momemts of hilarity.

This book is so, so funny! Beginnig with a wedding that never happens, thanks to the ingenious plans of a mother, down to the pains taken by an attentive young man to prove his love. Very 'G' rated and ever so funny! Recommended to everyone for a bunch of good laughs!

Bertie Wooster is one of P.G. Wodehouse's greatest comic characters. He is normally balanced by the quick wit, aplomb and shimmering progress of Jeeves, his butler. But even butlers need a vacation. So Bertie bids good-bye to Jeeves for the year . . . and promptly faces all sorts of unexpected problems.

The troubles begin a most distraught telephone call to Bertie from Lady Wickham. She sobs between words as she demands to know if "this awful news is true." The awful news is in this morning's Times. When Bertie opens the Times, he finds an announcement of his engagement to Lady Wickham's daughter, Bobbie, a woman to whom he has tried to become engaged to in the past. Darned if Bertie can figure out what it's all about. Bobbie, although beautiful, is one of those women who want to improve their men, and Bertie isn't up for such improvements. The path to solving the challenge leads him to his aunt Dahlia's country home, Brinkley Court, to help her entertain Homer Cream, an American tycoon who is doing a deal with her husband, Tom, where Bobbie is also staying. Bertie's old headmaster is also in residence, which leaves Bertie quaking. But the lure of Anatole's delightful cooking draws Bertie to Brinkley.

Once there, events become ever wackier. Sir Roderick Glossop, who thinks Bertie is dotty, is posing as the butler to evaluate a fiancé.

As usual, romance, plots to gain funds, weird collections and mistaken identities quickly twist the story into unexpected complications and directions.

The pages are filled with original similes and metaphors that will delight any student of the English language. This story has great fun with the fish theme. Bertie's great friend Reginald Herring has the nickname of "Kipper." At one point, Bertie says coldly that "I have every right to goggle like a dead halibut . . . ." Elsewhere, Bobbie's motives are described as, "She wanted you to see the big fish . . . you must have been surprised to see Kipper . . . ." Cream and cream pitchers are also done well in this story.

But the best schemes of Bertie and Kipper come a cropper, and Jeeves has to be called back to make a miraculous recovery for the causes of love and the old feudal spirit.

Right ho!

This was my first P G Wodehouse and I listened to this on tape. The person reading it, makes Bertie Wooster come alive and it is very witty and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The slang may be a bit different, but given in the context of the book, I am sure you could figure it out. Jeeves has taken off for his holiday in this particular book, and Bertie is invited to Aunt Delia's for the time to help her entertain guests from America. Bertie discovers before he leaves for his visit, that he has proposed marriage to Roberta and it is posted in the London Times. Bertie knows Roberta will be at Aunt Delia's and proceeds to go there and find out when it was that she accepted his marriage proposal. His understanding and subsequent bumblings lead you on a merry path. Not really that much of a mystery, but a delightful book still.