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Best of P. G. Wodehouse (Set of 3 Books) Mike/ Piccadilly Jim/ My Man Jeeves

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Best of P. G. Wodehouse (Set of 3 Books) Mike/ Piccadilly Jim/ My Man Jeeves by P. G. Enjoy the humor and wit of P. G. Wodehouse with this collection of three beloved books. "Mike," "Piccadilly Jim," and "My Man Jeeves" showcase Wodehouse's comedic genius and knack for storytelling.

1260 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 16, 2023

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About the author

P.G. Wodehouse

1,682 books6,890 followers
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, was a comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success during a career of more than seventy years and continues to be widely read over 40 years after his death. Despite the political and social upheavals that occurred during his life, much of which was spent in France and the United States, Wodehouse's main canvas remained that of prewar English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career.

An acknowledged master of English prose, Wodehouse has been admired both by contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by more recent writers such as Douglas Adams, Salman Rushdie and Terry Pratchett. Sean O'Casey famously called him "English literature's performing flea", a description that Wodehouse used as the title of a collection of his letters to a friend, Bill Townend.

Best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a talented playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of fifteen plays and of 250 lyrics for some thirty musical comedies. He worked with Cole Porter on the musical Anything Goes (1934) and frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. He wrote the lyrics for the hit song Bill in Kern's Show Boat (1927), wrote the lyrics for the Gershwin/Romberg musical Rosalie (1928), and collaborated with Rudolf Friml on a musical version of The Three Musketeers (1928).

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Profile Image for Realini Ionescu.
3,509 reviews15 followers
August 31, 2025
Piccadilly Jim by PG Wodehouse, fabulous author of Joy in The Morning http://realini.blogspot.com/2023/02/j... and at least ten other great comedies

10 out of 10





One of the best things we can do to improve our wellbeing is to resort to humor, which is also a crucial Character Strengths, in the Transcendence department, as identified by the co-founder of Positive Psychology, the illustrious Martin Seligman http://charlusguermantes.blogspot.com/ author of Flourish, Learned Optimism, Authentic Happiness and a good number of other life changing books…



“The person who doesn't read lives only one life…The reader lives 5,000…Reading is immortality backwards” ― Umberto Eco said this and Piccadilly Jim is one of those immense rewards that reading offers the astute intellectual (wow, that includes me somehow) if there is a skepticism in regards to some books that fail to inspire – alas, I have tried a couple in the past few weeks that did not rise to my level…Oops, it is the other way around, obviously, I could not get the attention, zest, courage to face many pages without the certainty that this will have proved to be miraculous by the end, and therefore I had to abandon the opus

Piccadilly Jim would be clearly dismissed, nay worse, condemned to retire into absolute oblivion for his attitude and the humor we enjoy will be stigmatized and labeled sexist…how times change, there are some things we could always blame, and indeed, the appeal that our hero (anti-hero in Woke parlance) Piccadilly Jim aka James Crocker makes to his love interest, Ann Chester, to have him control her, be a partner that will somehow fight with her will surely have double entendre, on the one side it is instructive, married people will be well advised to have sparkle in their atmosphere, but the notion that he may exert some dominance, a restraining influence could be anathema, that is male chauvinism.



Actually, I just realized that it could be fun to read some of the ‘older’ novels with a new age, Progressive, Cancel Culture in mind and have fun at seeing established figures being demolished with a contemporary set of rules – with that, we could see a whole dictionary of the good and the great disappear in smoke, after all, in the realm of De Santis, Florida, and other red American states [as in MAGA country} they ban books nowadays, and then I could enter some local to-read list, with other nonentities, scribbling nonsense, but of the bland, unchallenging kind – and think of how to interpret one passage or another, laugh, as one feels the urge, or cover the mouth and say ‘how could they put that out?’

Take the woman sent by the detective to help uncover the plot in the house of ultra-rich Peter Pett and his wife, Nesta Ford Pett, who is perhaps the very definition of the ultra-liberal of these days, hating the wealthy with passion, dedicated to defeat them all, she is in the narrative a figure of extreme hilarity, but with the nouveaux vague, it will be with admiration and awe that we should look at her…also, the fact that her disability is misused to try and provoke smiles or mirth is plain wrong and regrettable



However, I am reminded of the fantastic The Paradox of Choice http://realini.blogspot.com/2015/07/t... by wondrous Barry Schwartz from which one important take is that there are two kinds of people (some will fall in between, or outside no doubt) the Satisfizers and Maximizers, the former are, as their label suggests, happy with good enough, while the latter will just opt for maximum, in perpetuity staying displeased or plain desperate.

Hence, the way with Piccadilly Jim and presumably most, or all other novels is too enjoy the ride and laugh at the foolishness, excesses of some personages, starting with the antihero himself – somehow, instead of my plea, I am again inclined and here I go, showing you another major flaw of the playboy, he had attacked Ann about five years before we meet them, and made her give up poetry writing, something he eventually finds praiseworthy, for if it were not for him, she would keep producing bad poetry, IIWFY is a game we find in another major psychology work Games People Play http://realini.blogspot.com/2015/07/t... by Eric Berne...



There is jocosity, and Something Fresh http://realini.blogspot.com/2023/01/s... in the pages of this magnificent book (with the caveats mentioned, that is, if you are young, restless, devoted to the new codes, you are much better off with Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/06/g... or some other contemporaneous story) where Jim is waking after a night of excess and asks the butler, Bayliss, if ‘he has painted himself yellow, because he (Jim) sees something of a ‘gambauje’ color…

When Bayliss offers breakfast, Jim retorts along the lines of ‘don’t be flippant, being funny at the wrong time is wrong, tact is a much finer quality than humor ‘and then when considering the solution to this massive, but apparently perpetual hangover, for one man is really the epitome of the fallen man, he asks for just a ‘couple of bathtubs of cognac or brandy’, thus respecting the rule written by Aristotle millennia ago, when he considered the fact that the hero must have a fall, but a reasonable one, there must be revelation and reversal, as for instance in Oedipus http://realini.blogspot.com/2017/03/o... where our Man finds he had killed his father and then married his own mother, Piccadilly Jim will have a chance to redeem himself Alhamdulillah!



One other passage that I found excruciatingly funny is when Peter Pett wakes up in the middle of the night, and he is so enraged by the cries of pain or fear, that he comes down without any intention to help anybody, and this ironical tone is present throughout, we have therefore the benefit of many layers of jesting, where Ann for instance is praised for her ‘progress’, she used to write bad poems and look at her now, how much she has improved, she is planning to…kidnap children now, all due to Piccadilly Jim, now is this marvelous or what?



http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/u... and I took part in the Revolution that took down Ceausescu, what http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/r...
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