Life at Blandings: An Omnibus

I love PG Wodehouse, and the Blandings books are by far my favorites. I have the hardback edition of this omnibus, and the prefaces by the author are every bit as charming and witty and sweet-natured as the three novels they introduce.

This is my first P.G. Wodehouse book. I liked the stories so much that I immediately bought another of his books. The plots are amusing, but the characters are the center of the book. Lord Emsworth is described as a man who "never experienced the thirll of ambition fullfilled, ... but never knew the agony of ambition frustrated". Another very interesting character, Mr. Peters, who belongs to a group of men who "... cannot rest, who are so constituted that they can only take their leisure in the shape of a change of work". Interestingly, their personalities evolve as the story unfolds. Wodehouse satire excludes no one not even writers. He writes, "The reason why all we novelists with bulging foreheads an expensive educations are abandoning novels and taking to writing motion-picture secnarii is because the latter are so infinitely the more simple and pleasant". I also enjoyed his reference to the critics in the preface of "Summer Lightning".It's certainly a very entertaining book, with a lot of opportunities for vocabulary building. I would recommend this book for students of English as a second language.

The three novels in this volume are three of the first four novels in P G Wodehouse's great Blandings Castle series (the other is Leave It to Psmith). Something Fresh isn't quite as good as Summer Lightning and Heavy Weather, because that memorable pig, the Empress of Blandings, has not yet appeared at the Castle. Heavy Weather takes place immediately after Summer Lightning, and the two are, in my opinion, two of Wodehouse's very best. Some of the great Wodehouse characters are here - the woolly-headed Ninth Earl of Emsworth, his sister, Lady Constance, and brother, The Honorable Galahad Threepwood, not to mention, among others, The Efficient Baxter. Not to be missed by anybody with a sense of humor.