P.G. Wodehouse Summer Reading

I commend Stephen Bainbridge for his summer reading plan to reread the entire Jeeves-Wooster cycle. “Ring for Jeeves” is great, and I concur with his observations on it.

Before the great flurry of packing boxes and shuffling around, I was reading some early Jeeves-Wooster stories out loud to my husband. Even without the British accent the language makes for outstanding live reading.

Another good collection of short stories is Very Good, Jeeves, which includes one of my favorites, “The Inferiority Complex of Old Sippy”.

When in England in March I acquired an anthology of a few Jeeves-Wooster novels with a foreword by Hugh Laurie, who played Bertie Wooster in the BBC/A&E productions in the late 1980s (opposite an inspired Stephen Fry as Jeeves). Laurie’s foreword was hilarious, and well worth buying a volume even with an overlap of a novel I already owned!