By Megan Thomas
I read these over Christmas – it seemed a fitting introduction to PG Wodhouse, whose short stories I’ve been meaning to read for years.
The fact that this review is being published now is evidence of the intense review procrastination that I’ve been suffering in January. Has anyone had that before? It’s not that I don’t have loads of books to review – for once I’m ahead in that respect. But every Friday, which is when I usually post, my brain has said “nope, not today”. My solution is posting on a Saturday… Take that, brain.
Wodhouse wrote 90 books, 40 plays, and 200 short stories and other writings in his lifetime, so I think it’s fair to say he’s rather prolific. Thus, the 13 short stories I’ve skimmed from the surface of his writing career leaves much to be read. What should be next?
In an increasingly insane world, I found these stories silly, cheeky and charming, which I imagine was also what sparked their success at their time of writing, given that his narratives take place largely in a pre-war society despite the tumultuous political era Woodhouse lived through.
Each story is seasoned with wit and absurdity, and I think if I were to read more stories of this nature in the future, I’ll use them as palette cleansers between novels – I often find the previous book is still lingering when I start a new one. That said, each story has a unique ability to remove you from the world for a short window of time, meaning you can read them back to back without them all mulching into one, which can be an issue with reading a short story collection as if it’s a novel.
Despite being deeply rooted in time – and specifically the lives of the British gentry, they have a timelessness about them which is testimony to Wodhouse’s intelligence.
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Read more short story collections:
Have You Read This 