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It took some doing to get ahold of My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse. None of the library systems around me had it (and there are 4!). I finally discovered it accidentally on an audiobook app I had just downloaded - Librivox. Otherwise, I would have been out of luck. I'm not a huge audiobook person, so I've only been listening to it when I go running. Which means, after nearly a month, I'm still not quite finished. Just half of the last story to go (so please, nobody tell me how it turns out!).
I also decided to read a paper Jeeves novel that I already owned during this month - Aunts Aren't Gentlemen. Turns out it's the last Jeeves novel written by Wodehouse, so inadvertently, I ended up reading Bertie and Jeeves' first and last adventures during April.
It was very interesting to see what had changed over the course of those 15 novels and what hadn't. Wodehouse's humor was the same. Bertie Wooster was just as bumbling and helpless as ever, and Jeeves is just as wise and resourceful as ever. In My Man Jeeves, though, there was a bit more emphasis on Bertie's battle for independence, although that only stretched as far as the purchase of a hat or coat that Jeeves disapproved of. In Aunts Aren't Gentlemen, Bertie was wrapped completely around Jeeves' little finger, even if he didn't understand him any better as a person than he had in the first novel. The other major difference I noticed was that Aunts Aren't Gentlemen had a lot of abbreviations that sometimes took me quite awhile to puzzle out. For example, "And life in a country cottage with the aged r just around the corner would be a very different thing from a country c with her. . ." Kind of brings the fluid reading to a halt. Whereas, My Man Jeeves didn't have any of these. Or it's possible that the audiobook narrator just read the whole word instead of the abbreviation for the sake of clarity.
Wodehouse seems to have found a formula, a style, and a voice that worked for him in My Man Jeeves, and he stayed true to form all the way through Aunts Aren't Gentlemen. It takes quite the imagination to think up all the scrapes that Bertie was constantly getting himself into, inadvertently or through his own foolishness. At the end of the day, though, it wasn't the plots that stuck with me. It was Wodehouse's laugh-out-loud wit, which I'm sure garnered me some strange looks as I'm running along laughing to myself. But who can help it, when confronted with such lines as, "The man looked like Clarence, only an earlier model. I concluded that it must be Clarence's father." Still makes me chuckle even now.
I also decided to read a paper Jeeves novel that I already owned during this month - Aunts Aren't Gentlemen. Turns out it's the last Jeeves novel written by Wodehouse, so inadvertently, I ended up reading Bertie and Jeeves' first and last adventures during April.
It was very interesting to see what had changed over the course of those 15 novels and what hadn't. Wodehouse's humor was the same. Bertie Wooster was just as bumbling and helpless as ever, and Jeeves is just as wise and resourceful as ever. In My Man Jeeves, though, there was a bit more emphasis on Bertie's battle for independence, although that only stretched as far as the purchase of a hat or coat that Jeeves disapproved of. In Aunts Aren't Gentlemen, Bertie was wrapped completely around Jeeves' little finger, even if he didn't understand him any better as a person than he had in the first novel. The other major difference I noticed was that Aunts Aren't Gentlemen had a lot of abbreviations that sometimes took me quite awhile to puzzle out. For example, "And life in a country cottage with the aged r just around the corner would be a very different thing from a country c with her. . ." Kind of brings the fluid reading to a halt. Whereas, My Man Jeeves didn't have any of these. Or it's possible that the audiobook narrator just read the whole word instead of the abbreviation for the sake of clarity.
Wodehouse seems to have found a formula, a style, and a voice that worked for him in My Man Jeeves, and he stayed true to form all the way through Aunts Aren't Gentlemen. It takes quite the imagination to think up all the scrapes that Bertie was constantly getting himself into, inadvertently or through his own foolishness. At the end of the day, though, it wasn't the plots that stuck with me. It was Wodehouse's laugh-out-loud wit, which I'm sure garnered me some strange looks as I'm running along laughing to myself. But who can help it, when confronted with such lines as, "The man looked like Clarence, only an earlier model. I concluded that it must be Clarence's father." Still makes me chuckle even now.
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