Wodehouse loved the game, and it shows in his writing. While golfers with a sense of tradition will appreciate many of the sometimes-obscure references, one need not be a golfer to appreciate the elegance of these short stories. The Egnlish language is beautifully used here. I take this down every few years and read the stories as if for the first time. If these don't make you laugh, you've got a serious problem

As a lover of golf and a professional writer, I recommend this book to anyone, especially those who love the game.

Forget that every plot is identical. Wodehouse's genius is in his phrasing, his irony and his outrageousness. He is a master of caricature and timing.

Wait for that day of rain or snow, curl up by the window and lose yourself in the dreamy fantasy world of golf. You will simply laugh out loud.

Wow - This guy is a very concise and accurate writer. I was literally laughing as I read it and for several days afterward.

It is a solid read with much punch to it.

Galahad at Blandings is a book part of the Blandings Castle series, but I wouldn't call it Wodehouse's best book. It is a about a couple, Sam and Sandy, and how they come together. They have a fight, and Sam comes to Blandings Castle as an imposter, to resolve the fight, as Sandy won't talk to him at all. Then in the end, money is given, fights are resolved, and everyone is happy. It is a tremendously funny book, as many of the main character are quite eccentric, so I suggest you pick up a copy quickly. Enjoy!!! Cheers!!!!!!!!! : )

This story by P.G. Wodehouse is very entertaining and a really good read. A great escape into the magical world of Wodehouse.

The Hon. Galahad Threepwood is back. This time he has assigned himself the dubious task of bringing three different couples together. The setting is England, Blandings Castle, of course, complete with the amiable dunce Lord Emsworth and his prize-winning porker, the Empress, infamous for her role in 'PIG-HOO-EY'.

On his way to London to pick up his brother Clarence (Lord Emsworth), Galahad, a dapper middle-aged man eyes the name on a sinister package that Lord Emsworth's secretary Sandy Callendar has asked him to post. The parcel is addressed to a chap named Bagshott. This detail excites Galahad's curiosity because he used to be bosom with a fellow named Bagshott. But the Bagshott that the Hon. Galahad knew (Boko) had long since retired from the earth. Discovering that the contents of said package are a pile of letters that will effectively sunder Sandy Callendar's relationship with Boko's son, Samuel Galahad Bagshott, Gally becomes determined to keep the sparring couple afloat. Having been staunchly opposed to sundered hearts since he was a boy, Galahad Threepwood is resolved to put matters right.

Sam and Sandy's dispute happens to be related to gambling and, well, naturally, the Drones Club. You see Sam stands to gain a sackful in a sweep if Tipton Plimsoll (fellow Drones Club member) weds the pretty dolt Veronica Wedge, Lord Emsworth's niece. But Sandy is diametrically opposed to the whole enterprise, urging Sam to part with the debatably generous syndicate offer. And she still hasn't forgiven Sam for telling her that she looks like a "horror from outer space" with a particular pair of glasses on. Plus, Sandy is a redhead, making the task for Gally that much more difficult - as we all know, redheaded women have short and irrational tempers. Enter the "pint-sized bozo," Wilfred Allsop, cousin of Veronica Wedge. On a bender one night in New York with his new friend Tipton Plimsoll, Willie, who somewhat "resembles the poet Shelley," reveals his affections for Lord Emsworth's pig lady, Monica Simmons. Tipton Plimsoll endorses the arrangement despite his belief that Ms. Simmons has the appearance of an "all-in wrestler."

As it is, all three of these impending alliances are dependent upon each other and the Hon. Galahad Threepwood knows it. You'll have to read the story to find out whether or not Gally is successful with his scheme to reunite the warring couples. Just know that he is a skilled raconteur and "teller of the tale." Gally will never miss a beat and he stays on top of it all, undoubtedly aided by his fondness for cocktails at all hours.

Galahad has many passions in life. One is to protect the reputation of one of his oldest and greatest friends, whiskey. Disgusted and offended by "coloured slides" and "temperance lectures" Gally goes on an anti-Tea tirade, accusing "the muck" as he calls it, of being responsible for the death of his poor, dear old friend Buffy Struggles, who "got run over by a hansom cab as he was crossing Piccadilly." Evidently, tea had sapped Buffy's strength.

Recalling another seemingly outrageous send-up, the Hon. Galahad exclaims, "The only safe way to get through life is to pickle your system thoroughly in alcohol." The story to prove the aforementioned theory involved two brothers, Freddie and Eustace Potts. Their French chef once served them a hedgehog while pretending that it was a chicken just to save some money. Well, Eustace, who was a "teetotaler" nearly died, but Freddie, who "had lived mostly on whiskey since early boyhood" showed no ill effects at all after consuming the carcass.

A large part of Gally wishes he could go back to his days at the Pelican Club. There, he would fascinate the members with his inimitable wit, and tireless devotion to mopping the sauce up like a vacuum cleaner in London pubs. Galahad happily recalls his days of getting pinched by the gendarmerie for being drunken and disorderly, vaunting that it would always take three of them to drag him away to the jug.

I recommend this book, especially as a device for teaching English. As the plot thickens, and it does thicken, especially when the Empress gets pie-eyed, and Gally is stretched not quite to his limits, the reader becomes aware that the Hon. Galahad could have been the Prime Minister if he had wanted to. Threepwood is a leader of the first rank - truly a man that we can all look up to. What Ho, Gally?

This book by P.G.Wodehouse is one of the best books ever.This is one book where Jeeves (coupled with Aunt Dahlia) are at their very best.It's about a very strange situash (as Bertie would put it) wherin Bertie has to steal an old 18th Century Cow Creamer for his Uncle Tom wanted, failing which his Aunt Dahlia would no longer permit him to taste the cooking of her master chef Anatole again. And, if this isn't bad enough, Bertie's freinds, Gussie Fink-Nottle and the Rev. Henry 'Stinker' Pinker make it worse. And, worst part of it all is old Pop Basset, his buddy and future Dictator of England, Roderick Spode as also Pop Basset's daughter, Madeline and her cousin Stiffy Byng. This book is best read with a dictionary and it is strictly recommended that you avoid the foreign phrases

All of the P.G. Wodehouse novels about Bertram ("Bertie") Wooster and his gentleman's gentleman, Jeeves, are funny. Some are reasonably complicated in their plots. But none compare to this classic in the series.

From the beginning, Bertie is up against impossible odds. Sent by his Aunt Dahlia to sneer at a Cow Creamer, Bertie dangerously bumps into Sir Watkyn Bassett, the magistrate who once fined him five guineas for copping a policeman's helmet on Boat Race night, and Roderick Spode, Britain's aspiring fascist dictator. The only trouble in this encounter is that Bertie is clutching the Cow Creamer on the sidewalk after having tripped on a cat and falling through the front door, and Sir Watkyn recognizes him as a former criminal. Barely escaping arrest on the spot, Bertie returns home to find that Aunt Dahlia wants him to debark immediately for Totley Towers where Sir Watkyn has just taken the Cow Creamer he has purchased after pulling a ruse on Uncle Tom. When there, Bertie is to steal the Cow Creamer. At the same time, he receives urgent telegrams from his old pal, Gussie Fink-Nottle, to come to Totley Towers to save his engagement to Madeleine Bassett. Bertie feels like he is being sent into the jaws of death.

Jeeves immediately fetches up a plot to get Madeleine Bassett, to whom he has been affianced twice, to invite Bertie to her father's home. Upon arriving, Sir Watkyn and Roderick Spode immediately catch him holding the Cow Creamer. Sir Watkyn threatens years in jail, until Madeleine comes in to rescue him. But Sir Watkyn proceeds to assume that everything that goes wrong from then is due to Bertie. For once, Bertie is the innocent party. But he takes the rap anyway, because of the code of the Woosters, never let a pal down.

Never has anyone had a goofier set of pals. Gussie Fink-Nottle has developed spiritually so that he has less fear, but his method of achieving this soon puts him in peril. Stephanie "Stiffy" Byng, Sir Watkyn's niece, has to be the goofiest acquaintance that Bertie has. She is a one-woman wrecking machine for creating havoc. Her fiance, another old pal of Bertie's, "Stinker" Pinker, the local curate, is only slightly better.

Just when you cannot see any way that Bertie can avoid gaol, Jeeves comes up with one brilliant plan after another. It's truly awe-inspiring as well as side-splittingly funny.

P.G. Wodehouse remarked that he preferred to write as though the subject were musical comedy, and he has certainly captured that mood here at its vibrant best. You'll be on the edge of your chair and trying to avoid falling on the floor laughing at the same time.

After you've followed more twists and turns than existed in the Labyrinth at Crete, consider how far you would go to save a pal . . . or to keep a secret . . . or to protect a loved one. What should the personal code be?

Be generous with your friends and to all humankind.

This is probably the best novel by Wodehouse and I enjoyed every bit of it.The ever disaster stricken Bertie and Jeeves feature in this book which has some of the memorable characters- Augustus Fink Nottle,Aunt Dahila,Madeline Basset ( Stars-are-God's-daisy-chains ),Pop Basset and Roderick Spode!.Bertie is sent By Aunt Dahila to pinch an 18 th century cow-creamer and what follows is typically wodehouse material.You just can't stop reading once you pick this book up!Wodehouse at his very best.

Leave it to Psmith is one of my favorite Wodehouse books. It's a book that can be read over again and always find something new to laugh about. I do wish however that the most popular edition published by Random House had a larger print. Why it has been published with such a small and difficult print? I have been searching Amazon to try a find a used version in large print and to no avail. Even if it could be in a regular pica size print would help. But we have to put up with a bit size print version that is smaller than elite and really very hard on the eyes. Wodehouse certainly would not approve if he could see it today. However, I do like the vintage cover that depicts Psmith perfectly.

It's real hard to actually say whether a particular Wodehousian novel is better than any other, but this one really takes the cake (and eats it too!) A marvellous story of the mayhem, chaos and utter confusion wreaked by the suave, amiable Psmith, this book leaves you gasping for more (even if you don't smoke a gasper). For Wodehousian fans, if you haven't read this one, well, what on earth have you been doing all these years!?! And for people who have no idea who or what or when a Wodehouse is, there's no better place to start than this bundle of craziness.

Psmith and Lord Emsworth together. What more can a Wodehouse fan want? The novel has everything that a Wodehouse lover yearns for. Lots of hilarious impersonations, the antics of the absent minded Lord Emsworth, the suavely nonpareil Psmith with his unique way of speaking, multiple impersonators wanting to steal the same thing from Blandings castle, the plight of Baxter....everything is there. This must be the most enthralling Wodehouse book I have ever read, though it is very difficult to choose the best. I read it for the first time when I was sixteen and through the years that have followed I have reread it a dozen times cover to cover and have enjoyed it as much or even more with every reading.
And even if I don't read the whole book, whenever I hold the volume in my hand in a book shop or in a library or in someone's house, I read and re-read the place where Psmith proposes to Eve Halliday. That is simply sublime.

Jeeves and Bertie Wooster are back in this ripping novel by P.G. Wodehouse, one of the best of the Wooster-Jeeves series. The novel takes place at Steeple Bumpleigh, a place which Bertie takes care to avoid, for the Hampshire estate invaribly brings unmitigated disaster to his life. The country house visit is peopled with such Wodehousian favorites as Lord Worpleston, Nobby Hopwood, Stilton Cheesewright, Edwin the Boy Scout, and Boko Fittleworth. The plot is, of course, pure Wodehouse, a combination of convulution and well-ordered chaos which contains no aspects of reality; it is Wodehouse's "musical comedy" world, a gentle upper-class romp over the British countryside, with fancy dress balls, English estates with its varied eccentric guests, and a mish-mash of dramatic irony. Wodehouse is pure satirical farce of the first order, told from the perspecitve of one of the most loveable, yet incompetent twits in English literature, Bertie Wooster, whose mix of understatement and hyperbole, linguistic abbreviations, weird similes and metaphors, and misplaced and misquoted literary allusions endear him to Anglophiles throughout the world. As one critic puts it, Wodehouse presents "a ray of pale English sunshine into a gray world," a quotation with which no lover of Wodehouse would ever argue. "Jeeves in the Morning" is a delight and required reading for any lover of well-written British prose.

Previous: The Code of the Woosters

Hailed by some as the best Jeeves and Bertie novel, Joy in the Morning was published in 1947, nine years after The Code of the Woosters, and finds Wodehouse at the top of his comic form. Through circumstances beyond his control, Bertie finds himself in the last place he ever wanted to be-the dreaded Steeple Bumpleigh, home to his menacing Aunt Agatha (now Lady Worplesdon) and his former fiancée Florence Craye. This novel introduces my favorite of Bertie's normally dim-witted friends, the not-so-dim-witted Boko Fittleworth, noted novelist and all-around good egg. As is the usual formula, there are romantic attachments in danger of being squelched, and Bertie in danger of having to marry a frightening female if anything goes amiss. With poor well-meaning Boko constantly doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, Florence's young brother Edwin the Boy Scout terrifying the populace with his acts of good will, and the overzealous policeman Stilton Cheesewright, Florence's latest fiancée, threatening Bertie with bodily mayhem, comedy abounds.

Next: The Mating Season

P.G. Wodehouse's "Jeeves" books are noted for their similarity of plot but suavity of execution. Of the latter, a "Times Literary Supplement (London)" critic writes: "...there comes a stage where the [inveterate] reader . . . finds a new pleasure in seeing how exquisitely it is done." The words "facile" and "frothy" describe Wodehouse's delectable concoctions, in which aristocratic Bertram "Bertie" Wooster finds himself inevitably drawn to the rescue of young lovers, a task to which he is eminently ill-suited. (Bertie, in wave after wave of well-intentioned malapropisms, undeserved self-esteem, unintentional ironies, misquoted allusions, and suspicion-raising bungling, would be the epitome of the foolish nouveaux riches, if only his own riche were nouveau.) Instead, Bertie, appeals to the old "feudal spirit" of his cunning and erudite butler Jeeves, Bertie's superior in everything but station. It is Jeeves who really comes to the rescue, bailing Wooster 'out of the soup.'

The stars of this show (as others have noted, Wodehouse wrote these adventures in a theatrical, musical-comedy style) are two pairs of "affianced" lovers; the fetching Zenobia "Nobby" Hopwood and writer Boko Fittleworth, and the intimidating couple of Florence Craye and G. D'Arcy "Stilton" Cheesewright; as well as Lord Percy Worplesdon: Florence's father, Nobby's ward, Bertie's uncle, and young Edwin's father--more on him later--and, finally, American shipping magnate, J. Chichester Clam.

There are some annoying flaws in the book: Some fortuitous happenings that strain even the permeable bounds of farce: the unexplained acceptance of Stilton by Lord Worplesdon, an outright lie by the proper (but usually more cunning) Jeeves, and the capitol punishment meted by foot to the backside of young Edwin. The latter does not trouble his sister Florence, although we learn early on that "Florence is one of those girls who look on modern enlightenments a sort of personal buddy." This coup d'Edwin may trouble some modern day readers. Still, this is light farce and one may excuse this ugly punishment through a metaphorical reading. After all, can one really trust the narration of Bertie Wooster when he utters such gems as " . . . and already much of the gilt, I feared, must now have rubbed off the gingerbread of their romance."

Although not as well crafted as "The Code of the Woosters," this book certainly rivals the former in its rich cast and nimble dialogue, and its subtle thrashing of the manner and speech of the British aristocracy. Recommended with a hearty "Right ho!"

If you step back and analyse the Jeeves stories you will find the story lines are shallow and often repeat in thinly disguised ways. The characters are two dimensional and heavily stereotypical.
The solution is ... don't step back. Wodehouse is brilliant on a line by line basis. Each word is chosen, each sentence crafted to draw you into the humour of the situation. I have often dropped the book as I rolled off the couch with tears streaming down my face.
If you are a well spoken Englishman, or can read as a wellspoken Englishman and have a dry sense of humour you will love Wodehouse. Some Americans I have tried Wodehouse on have struggled.
This particular book is not on particularly good paper and the collection of stories is fragmented, if you go onto other Wooster books you will find there are stories 'missed out in the middle' of this compilation.
But if you have never read Wodehouse, this is a good starter.

P.G. Wodehouse is one of my favorite writers. "Life with Jeeves" is the first Wodehouse book I ever read. Actually there are three books in this one. It's excellent, I read it about a year ago, and have been a fan of Wodehouse ever since. I highly recommend it!

I've been reading (and re-reading) Wodehouse for over 15 years now. I can't stay away for long. It seems no matter how often I read a Bertie and Jeeves, or a Blanding's Castle story, it is somehow fresh and pleasing. Scenes, lines, and even single words ("incredulous") keep popping unexpectedly into my mind and making me laugh out loud. If you have read him, read more! If you haven't, then for Heaven's sake start now and start often!!

"You silly a . . . " is a phrase often repeated by Bertram (Bertie) Wooster's favorite Aunt Dahlia in describing him in this country romp of romance and gastronomy gone wrong. And that's the nicest thing she has to say about him in this story.

Bertie's main redeeming quality to his friends and family in this story is his manservant, Jeeves. Over the years of their relationship, everyone who knows Bertie comes to realize that Bertie is a bumbling fool and that Jeeves is a problem-solving genius. The parallels to Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are unavoidable in one's mind, except these stories are played out as comedy along the lines of A Midsummer Night's Dream rather than as serious business. Like Dr. Watson for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Bertie is the narrator of this novel.

Bertie, as a gentleman, feels that it is important to keep Jeeves in his place. He looks for the old feudal spirit of serf to master from Jeeves. When Jeeves challenges Bertie's decision to wear an informal jacket in the country that he brought back from Cannes, Bertie decides to put Jeeves in his place.

In Right Ho, Jeeves, everyone is looking for solutions to their problems from Jeeves. The fly in the old ointment though is that Bertie tells Jeeves to stifle himself while Bertie tries to save the day. As you can imagine, each Bertie wheeze (or plot) turns out to be a blunder instead that makes things much worse. Then Bertie tries again, with even worse results. And so on.

As background to the story's beginning, Bertie is just back from two months in Cannes on the Riviera with Aunt Dahlia, his cousin Angela, and her friend, Madeline Bassett. Aunt Dahlia recruits Bertie to give the prizes at the local school, while Bertie scrambles to avoid the appearance. His old pal, Gussie Fink-Nottle, a newt expert, has fallen for Madeline Bassett but he is too shy to propose. Bertie works on Gussie's resolve. Tuppy Glossop, another pal, is engaged to cousin Angela until they have a row about double chins and sharks. Bertie tries to bring reconciliation to the warring parties. Aunt Dahlia's domestic peace depends on the gourmet cooking of Anatole, which is essential to get money for her magazine out of her dyspepsic husband, Uncle Tom, to offset what she lost at the casino. Bertie's misconceptions soon have Anatole in despair, and contemplating departure. Aunt Dahlia is shaken to the core.

Things look glum indeed for the young lovers, Aunt Dahlia, and for Bertie. How will the day be saved?

The book is wonderfully read by Alexander Spencer, my favorite narrator of these P.G. Wodehouse stories and novels. Wodehouse intended these to be read as musical comedy, rather than considered as being drawn from life. With the proper narration, with an appropriate English accent, the tales are much enhanced.

Why, then did I rate the book down one star? First, the plot does go on and on through its complications. A good editor could have chopped this down by about 25 percent and made a much better novel. Second, there is a reference to people of color beginning with the letter "n" that will offend many, and certainly offended me.

A better offering in this series are the stories in the audio cassettes entitled, Jeeves and the Old School Chum. You might start there if you don't know Bertie and Jeeves yet. Only after you have used up the five star Jeeves audio tapes should you listen to this one. And you should do so only if you are fully compelled to have more of Bertie and Jeeves.

After you have finished this book, consider whether you have ever failed to take good advice. If you have avoided that, was false pride involved? If so, how can you overcome that misconception and self-deception in the future?

What?

Previous: Thank You, Jeeves

One of the most popular of the Jeeves novels, Right Ho, Jeeves brings us to Brinkley Court, the lair of Bertie's Aunt Dahlia, who is by far my favorite secondary character in all the books. This book is overshadowed by a decidedly antagonistic relationship between Jeeves and Bertie over a certain white jacket with brass buttons, and one can practically see Jeeves snickering in the background when his brilliant solution to the problems at hand is accomplished at Bertie's expense. Nevertheless, he does "rally round" when needed, and saves Bertie from a fate more hideous than death, viz. marriage to the loony Madeline Bassett. There are moments of laugh-out-loud hilarity in this book, notably Gussie Fink-Nottle's prize-giving at the local grammar school after drinking a jug of spiked orange juice, Bertie's very ill-timed question about haggis (a personal favorite of mine-the line, not haggis), and Aunt Dahlia's calm suggestion that Bertie go out to the garden pool and drown himself. This is comedy at its brilliant best. A wonderful beginning to a chain of events and characters that will follow in many books to come.

Next: The Code of the Woosters

This is a favorite of all Jeeves and Wooster fans, and it features one of the most memorable scenes in the Wodehouse canon: Gussie Fink-Nottle's presentation of awards at a grammar school, after drinking a double-spiked orange juice. This is Wodehouse at his best - and that's saying plenty.

If you pick up Mike and Psmith and expect it to be like the wacky comedies that Wodehouse composed in the 20s and 30s, you might be slighted disappointed. This is early Wodehouse, a Wodehouse concerned with school masters, ragging (an expression for creating mischief) and especially cricket. It is also a more grounded Wodehouse, a novel where the comedy is more subtle, a novel where the characters are not quite so flighty. This is also Wodehouse at his least complex. This is not the novel that shows his mastery of the convulted plot, where every word spoken and deed done entagles our heros and heroines in further trouble.

This said, I need to quickly confirm that Mike and Psmith is a wonderful novel. It still has a freshness and innocence about it that is highly appealing. In this day and age, of rampant murders and unclear elections, Mike and Psmith is as sunny and cheerful a book as you are likely to find. And just to show you that I read Mike and Psmith with my eyes wide open, I have to state that my early comments are not intended as criticism but as a compliment. The subtlety is the very reason why this novel is so great! It is his art in creating a scene or a character and putting in the interesting setting of Sedleigh that Wodehouse shows why so many refer to him as the Master.

Mike and Psmith is not the funniest book Wodehouse wrote, but it does have many incredible scenes, especially Mr. Downing's search for the paint splashed shoe. I agree with the other reviewers that this is the high point of the book. I think readers will find a lot to enjoy in this novel. It is an escape to a world not that far removed for our own but placed in a time that we will never see again. This novel truly scores a century!

This is so, so completely funny. I love this book. I have read it so many times and it's still funny. It's about this two English boys at school. The school-story genre is fairly grim, I know, with all it's moralizing and weird relationships between students etc., but this is so completely funny. It's probably my favorite of all the Psmith books (although, Leave it to Psmith is fairly excellent as well).

I have to confess that I am a Wodehouse addict. I read the predecessor to this book (Mike at Wrykyn) when I was fifteen and had always wanted to read Mike and Psmith. Re. this book, Wodehouse had me in stitches most of the time - the portions relating to Mr. Downing are hilarious. Cricket is also a focus of this novel. If you are like me and miss the game, this will bring those school time memories flooding back.

For those who haven't read a Psmith novel before, I highly recommend them. It is said that Wodehouse created the Jeeves and Wooster characters as 2 spin-offs from Psmith and you can certainly see the connections! On the whole, another Wodehouse classic.

These funny, light stories by P.G. Wodehouse are a must-read for any fans of him or British humor in general. This collection is the first of many featuring Bertie Wooster, a none-too-bright English gent, and his ingenius butler Jeeves, who is constantly thinking of schemes to get Bertie and his friends out of trouble. The Jeeves stories are a great place to start for anyone interested in Wodehouse's funny work. Though the stories are sometimes a bit long and may drag a little, they are still charming, charming tales. Delicious reading.

Martin Jarvis' reading of Carry On, Jeeves runs circles around Jonathan Cecil's reading of anything (for more on Cecil, see Psmith: Journalist). He simply embodies the characters of Bertie Wooster, Jeeves, Biffy, Corky, and all the cast (albeit with the same typical attempt at an American accent).

Carry On, Jeeves contains eight of the ten stories available in the print version (the remaining two stories appear on My Man Jeeves), so completists will want that, but for pure enjoyment, you can't go wrong with this. Even the titles Wodehouse writes are funny, my favorite being "The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy." They simply roll off the tongue.

The stories here include "Jeeves Takes Charge" (chronologically the first as it tells the story of Jeeves' entry into Bertie's life). The others, namely "The Artistic Career of Corky," "Clustering Round Young Bingo," "Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest" (about a young cousin of Bertie's who goes wild under his wing), and "Jeeves and the Hard-Boiled Egg" are all classics of the Wodehousian genre and show Jeeves at his problem-solving best.

This would easily appeal to the casual Wodehouse fan, and is perfect for long road trips or any other situation where a laugh is needed. Wodehouse exceeds all others in humor and, one assumes, will remain that way for centuries to come.

It's almost impossible to write funny about humor, and anyone who writes seriously about it is doomed to come off as a fuddy duddy. E.B. White, a funny writer himself, once said that analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog, in that the thing tends to die in the process and the results will be interesting only to the purely scientific mind. -Andrew Ferguson, Divine Comedy : P.G. Wodehouse's perfect pitch

Two things the critics generally agree on are that : (1) P. G. Wodehouse is one of the funniest writers in the English language; and, (2) it's almost impossible to explain why. Among the various authorities cited for the difficulty in analyzing humor are Evelyn Waugh and Sigmund Freud, themselves authors of hilarious fictions. Suffice it to say, and I mean this in the very best sense, the enjoyments of the Jeeves and Wooster stories are much the same as those of the great TV sitcoms. Wodehouse created these two great comic characters, surrounded them in each story with oddballs, plunked them all down in trying situations, and then had the inimitable Jeeves extract Bertie and his upper-class nitwit friends from their difficulties through various stratagems and diversions. Though Andrew Ferguson and others deny that there is any deeper meaning or political content to the stories, it is at least notable that the finest young gentlemen in all of England are hopelessly overmatched by life unless Jeeves steps in to save them. The resulting stories have a certain sameness to them--of course, just try watching ten episodes of Cheers in a row and see if it's still fresh and amusing in hour five--but read in moderation they are immensely enjoyable and their very familiarity becomes quite comforting.

GRADE : A+

This is the first Blandings Castle novel, and the first novel in what we now think as the true P.G. Wodehouse style. For the first time, the interplay between absent-minded peers, quick-to-anger relatives and friends, and those amazing good-natured yet good-for-nothing younger sons come together in a comic dance of quick assumptions, identity switches, flirts with embarrassment, and, oh yes, love.

If Wodehouse wasn't so widely admired by the critics, I would have to claim him as a guilty pleasure. Although I can quote style and form with the best of them, the real truth is that I read Wodehouse because he amuses. In Wodehouse's hands, the sly wink equals the over-the-top exaggeration, and only one will work in the place that he puts it.

I tried to slow my reading speed down on this book, to gain an understanding of the flow and the way the language worked. I failed miserably--before I realized it, I was caught up once again in the action of the story and I wasn't observing but enjoying. I'm thinking that to truly study a novel, I am going to have to force myself to retype it.

If your acquaintance with the wonderful world of Wodehouse begins and ends with Jeeves and that bit of a thick-o, Bertram Wilburforce W. then it's high time you came to Blandings Castle to meet Lord Emsworth and his idiot son Freddie,what?And "something fresh" is exactly where you'd want to start.Structured like a detective or spy novel and woven ever so tightly,it leaves you wondering....could all this bally intrigue be about something so incredibly silly? (and I'm far and away from meaning silly as an insult).Lighthearted and romantic without ever being lightweight, beautifully written and zanily paced, you'll want to spend a holiday as a guest at Blandings castle as soon as possible.Go ahead,satisfy your anglophilic urges...read some Wodehouse!

Something Fresh is the first book of the Blandings Castle series, and in my opinion, the best. It is about a person named Lord Emsworth who accidentally steals a millionaire's scarab. The millionaire also happens to be his son's future father-in-law. The millionaire hires a man to find it, while the man's friend also gets information on the scarab. So both try to steal, while the Lord Emsworth's secretary, not knowing that it is the millionaire's, tries to prevent them from recovering the scarab. The encounters between the man,his girl friend, and the secretary will keep you laughing. Not only I, but also other people, who have read this book after I recommended it, share the view that Something Fresh is an extraordinary book. Get your hands on this book as fast as you can, and soon you will be famished for more books by P.G. Wodehouse. It will, and I am totally serious here, make you laugh until you have laughed all the laughs you can laugh, and cried all the tears you can cry. Hope you enjoy!!!! Cheers!!!!! : )