Rating: 5 out of 5
‘Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen’ is not my first Wodehouse book. Ever since picking one up some years ago (‘My Man Jeeves’ in 2020), I’ve enjoyed nearly all of them to a great degree, even if my reviews on most of them have been rather short. However, a paragraph in this title was so funny for me that I had to look it up—looking it up made me find a number of other commentaries on this work too.
For reference, this is the paragraph in question:
… his idea of a good time was to go off with a pair of binoculars and watch birds, a thing that never appealed to me. I can’t see any percentage in it. If I meet a bird, I wave a friendly hand at it, to let it know that I wish it well, but I don’t want to crouch behind a bush observing its habits.
—’Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen’
Absolutely hilarious and a sentiment I can come along with very well!
In my reading of commentaries on this book, I found several that attacked it, calling it sub-par with respect to the rest of Wodehouse’s creation. All in all, I don’t agree with this: I was very amused throughout, and the political jokes on Orlo Porter worked rather well in my opinion too.
