Any Wodehouse fans here?

josephperin

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No particular reason for asking. Just that I grew up reading Jeeves and Psmith.
 

CassandraW

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Huge fan -- I have all the Jeeves/Wooster books and stories, and many of the Psmith and Uncle Fred ones.
 

ElaineA

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Meeee! :hooray:

I only discovered him within the last 15 years. Then after reading several of the collections myself, when my son needed to read something and do a book report I threw The Code of the Woosters at him. For a parent whose son who despised (and still does) reading, there was no greater music than hearing him upstairs laughing his ass off, and no greater feeling than him running downstairs to give me a recap of the latest madcap hijinks of Bertie and the poor souls in his orbit. Ever grateful to Wodehouse for that.
 

josephperin

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It's Psmith, Uncle Fred and Jeeves for me. In that order.

Bobbie Wikham is my favorite Bertie girl. :)
 

Silva

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My brother got me hooked on them when I was a teen (mostly I was reading a lot of Saddle Club and other extremely fluffy escapist teen girl books at that time). Good job, bro.

Not properly Wodehouse, but in the television series where Bertie Wooster is smearing treacle on paper to break a window and steal a painting-- one of the few times I ever saw my dad laughing uncontrollably. :D
 

OTurtle

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Oh, I love P. G. Wodehouse! My favorites are the Blandings Castle books (Lord Emsworth and his vacant but deep love for the Empress! All the impostors! Scarabs! Baxter and the flowerpots!). But I also have a deep and abiding love for the golf stories--they almost (almost!) made me want to take up golf myself. I'm also very fond of the Mulliner stories.

I enjoyed the Fry/Laurie series (my favorite episode is the one in which they travel to New York and get involved with a new musical, the main chorus number of which is "Ask Dad"--that's a family favorite), but did anyone else ever see the series of half-hour productions called "Wodehouse Playhouse" starring Pauline Collins and John Alderton (of Upstairs, Downstairs fame)? You can find a lot of them on YouTube. They are utterly delightful. The first season came out while Wodehouse was still alive and he actually introduced them.
 

josephperin

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Old selection of random quotes:(copied from Facebook page of Drones' Club)

P.G. Wodehouse quotes

“And she's got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Mostly Sally

“There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“The voice of Love seemed to call to me, but it was a wrong number.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Very Good, Jeeves!

“He had just about enough intelligence to open his mouth when he wanted to eat, but certainly no more.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Man Upstairs and Other Stories

“Red hair, sir, in my opinion, is dangerous.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Very Good, Jeeves!

“At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Uneasy Money

“There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, 'Do trousers matter?'"
"The mood will pass, sir.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters

“He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters

“I'm not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare who says that it's always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Carry on, Jeeves

“Everything in life that’s any fun, as somebody wisely observed, is either immoral, illegal or fattening.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“What ho!" I said.
"What ho!" said Motty.
"What ho! What ho!"
"What ho! What ho! What ho!"
After that it seemed rather difficult to go on with the conversation.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, My Man Jeeves

“She looked as if she had been poured into her clothes and had forgotten to say "when". ”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Best of Wodehouse: An Anthology

“I always advise people never to give advice.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“A melancholy-looking man, he had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life's gas-pipe with a lighted candle.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Man Upstairs and Other Stories

“If there is one thing I dislike, it is the man who tries to air his grievances when I wish to air mine.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Love Among the Chickens

“I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“Mike nodded. A sombre nod. The nod Napoleon might have given if somebody had met him in 1812 and said, "So, you're back from Moscow, eh?”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Mike and Psmith

“Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing-glove.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Very Good, Jeeves!

“I am not always good and noble. I am the hero of this story, but I have my off moments.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Love Among the Chickens

“It was one of those parties where you cough twice before you speak and then decide not to say it after all.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Adventures of Sally

“A certain critic -- for such men, I regret to say, do exist -- made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained 'all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.' He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have out-generalled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Summer Moonshine

“In a series of events, all of which had been a bit thick, this, in his opinion, achieved the maximum of thickness.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“If he had a mind, there was something on it.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“There is only one cure for grey hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“Marriage is not a process for prolonging the life of love, sir. It merely mummifies its corpse.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Small Bachelor

“You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Carry on, Jeeves
 

rugcat

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Another Psmith fan here. Damn, now I'm going to have to take out all my old Wodehouse and go on a reading binge instead of getting any work done.

One thing that often gets overlooked (but not, I believe, by writers) is the immense amount of work, re-writing, crafting and polishing that went into creating that seemingly effortless prose. But really, how hard can it be to write something clever, frothy, and entertaining? Well, damn near impossible.

Here's an nice interview from when he was 91 -- and still writing.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3773/the-art-of-fiction-no-60-p-g-wodehouse
 

josephperin

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“To my daughter Leonora without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time.”


― P. G Wodehouse

This is my all-time favorite :D
 

shakeysix

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you bet your silver cow creamer I'm a fan! Galahad Threepwood and Uncle Fred are my favorite uncles. Gussie Fink- Nottle is my favorite Drone but then I like newts. Emerald Stoker is my favorite female. I strive to be Aunt Dahlia to my nieces and nephews. The Empress of Blandings is my favorite animal although Claude and Eustace's cats are a close second. George Cyril Wellbeloved is, of course, my favorite pig man.

"... when aunt is calling to aunt like mastodons across a primeval swamp..."

"He looked like a Roman Emperor who liked his potatoes with lots of butter."

"He winced and then groaned a little, like Prometheus watching his vulture drop in for lunch."

I cannot remember the novel but Bingo Little's wife, Rosie M. Banks, had an old school chum come to stay with them. Eventually the old friends got into a catfight. The best friend told Rosie that the death bed scene of her heroine's little boy, in her latest novel, was so badly written that she could not stop laughing. I cannot remember the exact words but I remember that I laughed until my ribs hurt. --s6
 

juniper

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Oh yeah! Read during high school and maybe college. I think I had much better, and more sophisticated, reading taste back then than I do now. Maybe I had more time? Was less worn down by the daily drudge?