The Mating Season (1949)

This wonderfully funny book contains some of Wodehouse's funniest scenes. I particularly like the chapter in which he is mistaken for a society burglar and ends up in an awkward tete-a-tete with a girl who thinks he's in love with her. A delight from beginning to end. ( )

Easily my favorite of the Jeeves books, and that's saying something.

Full disclosure: I am a huge Wodehouse fan, and my default rating for any of his books is 4 stars. But this one is something special. This is Wodehouse at the height of his powers, with perhaps the best cast of characters ever assembled in a single Wodehouse book. That so many separate stories can be balanced simultaneously would be a feat for any author, but to do so with such wit, humor, and clarity is something truly special. The description of Bertie and the port ranks, for me, as one of the funniest in all of Wodehouse, and the climax at the village concert is something I can read over and over again.

Recommendation: This is not where you should start reading the adventures of Bertie and Jeeves, but it is the pinnacle. Highly, highly recommended. ( )

Ho una scarsissima predisposizione verso la letteratura umoristica, meno che mai verso le commedie degli equivoci, e meno ancora verso lo humor britannico. Mi sono annoiata a morte, mi è sembrata u'autentica sciocchezzuola e sono anche consapevole di averne saltati degli interi brani. Il voto sufficiente è dato per equità. Ma con questo autore, che mi avevano tanto raccomandato, ho chiuso. Non fa per me.

It is amazing how Wodehouse could get away with telling the same story over and over.

This fairly late book is noteworthy for containing a plot summary of "Mervyn Keene, Clubman," the magnum opus of Rosie M. Banks the Celebrated Female Novelist. It is even worse than one would have imagined.

I don't know what I am going to do when I run out of the Wodehouse and Davis series that I have been reading so much of, but I am enjoying both immensely in the meantime. This was very typical, beautiful Wodehouse writing. There is something special about reading a comical work of fiction for the first time - you never recapture the same joy in reading the humour in subsequent readings... ( )