Nothing Serious by P.G. Wodehouse

I am on a multi-year, vaguely serious plan to read "all" of P.G. Wodehouse, in the lovely little Overlook hardcovers. He wrote around a hundred books, so it'll take a while, but I've got fifty-two down now (counting this one) and eight more sitting on the shelf to be read. So I do need to track down some of the more obscure and rare books - which might mean shelling out more money than I feel like spending at the moment - but it's all doable.

(I had a somewhat different shelf of Overlook Wodehouse before my flood in 2011 - probably forty or so; no idea how distributed between read and unread - but I'm taking the current shelf as the master record, so I'll be done when I have all of them and have read them, whether that's for the first time or not.)

Some of those books spark interesting posts on this blog, since Wodehouse was a deeply entertaining and fun writer for around seventy years.

But some of them are collections of short stories, largely about golf, originally published in 1950, and my options are to give potted plot synopses of each story (boring for both of us) or a general airy overview (quick and easy for me; possibly dull and vague for you). I hope you realize which way I'm going, and will forgive me if it is dull and vague.

Nothing Serious collects ten stories originally published, if I can trust the dates on the copyright page, between 1939 and 1948. Some may also have been original to the book. It leads off with two stories of the Drones Club, follows that with five about golf narrated by the Oldest Member, and then ends with three odd stories, including one very odd one featuring Lord Emsworth selling encyclopedias in a Long Island suburb.

Wodehouse in short form tends to be concentrated: there's not as much room for complication, so it's mostly the pure young-love-thwarted plots, with one major obstacle thwarting that love which is then cleared by the end of the story. There's occasionally other plots - Emsworth sells encyclopedias, as I mentioned above, to help a young woman who is already married (and pregnant) build a nest egg - but assuming each story is going to be about this guy and the lady he loves is a solid strategy.

And these are good stories, with some fine Wodehouse prose, from the prime period of his career. There is rather a lot of golf in it; short Wodehouse seems to be about golf more often than most readers expect. (Did he write short stories for a golfing magazine? I've never dug into the question.) It's not part of any of his major series, and not famous: if you read Nothing Serious, you're, like me, deep into the Wodehouse Cult and looking for more to keep going. Luckily, as I noted, he did write about a hundred books, so you can keep going for quite a while.