Where To Start With P.G. Wodehouse

Someone asked the above question on rec.arts.sf.written on 5/16/05, and this is what I replied:

If you want a nice big wodge of Wodehouse to start with, I'd grab either the already mentioned The World of Jeeves (which I have in a one-volume Perennial Library trade paperback, so it's been published as one book at least once) or one of the excellent omnibuses Life at Blandings and Life With Jeeves, each of which contains three complete books (and at least one book in each omnibus is a short-story collection, so you get Wodehouse in both short form and novel length).

If you want to try a single novel, let me suggest Leave It to Psmith, Joy in the Morning or Uncle Fred in the Springtime, as three really good novels I've read recently enough to remember clearly. Alternatively, pick up a random Jeeves novel; if the original publication date is before 1950, you can't go wrong. (And the later ones aren't bad, per se, they're just a bit over-worked and thinning.)

As someone else said, you really can't go wrong with any Wodehouse book from about 1920 to 1950. His short stories (about Mr. Mulliner, the Drones Club, golfing, or other things) are often even better than the novels. His golfing stories are amazingly funny, even for someone like me who has never picked up a club.

For those who demand something fantastic, I do know of one Wodehouse fantasy novel, Laughing Gas, in which a spoiled child star exchanges minds with the book's hero. That's one I read a year or two ago, and enjoyed even more than I expected. Wodehouse is painfully funny about many things, but one the things he's absolutely best on is old Hollywood. Of course, it wasn't "old" when he was there in the '30s, but you know what I mean.