About once a year, I go on a short P.G. Wodehouse binge for about a week. This year's started yesterday with Sunset at Blandings, an incomplete fragment, the last Wodehouse book and the last of the Blandings Castle Saga.
I think it was about 2003 when I first decided to give P.G. Wodehouse a try. I'd seen Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, and Christopher Moore all list him as one of their influences. The first one I read was World of Jeeves, the complete collection of Jeeves and Wooster short stories. I devoured it in two days and never looked back.
The Wodehouse books are a gateway into a fictional world of doddering nobility, monocles, top hats, and parties, the world of the idle rich of 1920's England. You wouldn't think a rural Midwesterner like myself would take to it but I did after the first few pages.
While Jeeves and Wooster brought me to the dance, once I exhausted those novels I stumbled upon the Blandings Castle saga. Jeeves and Wooster is essentially a two man show whereas The Blandings Castle series is more of an ensemble piece and eventually eclipsed Jeeves and Bertie in my affections.
As I write this, I've read 48 of P.G. Wodehouse's works, more than I've read from any other author, although Terry Pratchett is slowly gaining on him. And I'm just over halfway through Wodehouse seeing as how he's written over 80 books and was working on one at his hospital bed when he died at age 93.
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