2023 was definitely the year that contributed the most books to my current book list. There were seven books from my list that year that I never got around to reading, and Carry On, Jeeves was one of them. After my first introduction to Wodehouse in 2022, he got an automatic spot on my 2023 book list. The Inimitable Jeeves provided no end of laughs and considering that I dropped a pretty significant amount of good American money to add the Bertie and Jeeves collection to my personal library in 2020—ah, the year of massive online book shopping for me, how were you coping with the madness?—I wanted to make it a habit to read some Wodehouse each year.
Alas, here we are, four years later before I finally picked up the second installment in my Wodehouse collection. And if we're being realistic, it'll probably be another couple of years before I pick him up again seeing as next year I'll be tackling My Life In Books project—have you voted yet?—and Wodehouse lived and died well before I was born. But not because I didn't enjoy Carry On, Jeeves. It was just as much of a riot as The Inimitable Jeeves, and I found myself laughing aloud again during every outrageous story.
This collection of ten short stories which were popping up in the Saturday Evening Post were published together in London in 1925, and in New York in 1927. In this anthology, we get the origin story of how Jeeves came to be in Bertie's employ. Jeeves is enlisted, again, numerous times, to help Bertie's friends out of all manner of scrapes, particularly those having to do with maintaining good standing with wealthy aunts and uncles who bankroll their nephews' lives, and, of course, the frequent romantic entanglements they find themselves in. To give you an idea of how disastrously things turn out when Bertie tries to manage these conundrums without Jeeves' help, in this collection he inadvertently kidnaps a child, among other things. And this collection ends with a story from Jeeves' perspective in which he arranges for Bertie to give a talk at a girls' school after Bertie gets a wild hair to invite his aunt and three nieces to come and live with him. Jeeves is having none of that, and Jeeves always knows best.
Another rip-roaring, laugh-out-loud good time. Douglas Adams said that "Wodehouse is the greatest comic writer ever" and I think I might agree with him. I have one more collection of short stories to read before I get to an actual novel in my Bertie and Jeeves library, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing how Wodehouse's novels compare to his short story collections. If you haven't read Wodehouse yet, move him up your TBR.
What books or authors do you turn to for a good laugh?
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