Books like The Code of the Woosters

Review updated on January, 4 2020."I mean, imagine how some unfortunate Master Criminal would feel, on coming down to do a murder at the old Grange, if he found that not only was Sherlock Holmes putting in the weekend there, but Hercule Poirot, as well."I love this quote. It came from this book. For those who somehow manage to avoid knowing anything about this classic British humor series the main heroes are Bertie Wooster and his servant Jeeves. Bertie's job is to get into all kind of absurd and improbable (from the normal logic point of view) situations arising from his noble attempts to help his two aunts and countless friends and Jeeves' job is to get him out of yet another trouble using some truly ingenious tricks. This time it all started very much innocently. Bertie suffering from a hangover from a previous night's party visited one of his aunts - Dahlia. She asked him to go to an antique dealer to pick up a cow-creamer for her husband - an antique collector. At this point I have to talk about this particular kitchen utensil. A cow-creamer is a creamer (a vessel to serve cream in, for example for tea) made of silver in form of a cow; according to the description and Bertie's impression very ugly. I will let Bertie himself describe it."It was a silver cow. But when I say 'cow', don't go running away with the idea of some decent, self-respecting cudster such as you may observe loading grass into itself in the nearest meadow. This was a sinister, leering, Underworld sort of animal, the kind that would spit out of the side of its mouth for twopence."We all know that there is a very fine line between an enthusiastic collector and fanatical one, so seemingly easy mission of Bertie turned out to be very important. Bertie managed to fail, completely and promptly. This failure resulted in his visit to a countryside, double, triple, and quadruple blackmail, desperate attempts to help two couples in love overcome all obstacles in their way, equally desperate attempts to stay out of jail, and avoid getting beaten to pulp. May I remind you the centerpiece of all this excitement was a cow-creamer which antiquity was under serious doubt. Absurd and funny situations guaranteed. Let me start with good parts. At times the tale was really funny. I laughed out loud several times with one scene being particular good, especially considering this whole scene was played out in Bertie's imagination. So as a humorous book it works - most of the time.Speaking about my problems with it, during my first read I thought one of them was entirely my fault. Some scenes in the beginning depend on the knowledge of the previous adventures to be funny. Yours truly jumped from the first book straight to book seven - this one, so some jokes happily flew over my head unnoticed. The second time around I reread the book just for this reason: I recently finished all six previous books and wanted to check if the knowledge of the background would make the book funnier. It did not. The following problems did not depend on the knowledge of the previous books. This book strongly reminded me of a joke. A very funny joke with great payoff, but overly long - like it took this whole book to tell this one joke. Before I read the previous book (more details on it below) I thought that the short story format works much better for Bertie Wooster and Jeeves. Book 6 proved otherwise.I was not much impressed with Jeeves' solutions for the impossible situations. They seemed to me sort of ordinary; nothing like a brilliant work of mind of Jeeves in the second short story of the first anthology. That one made me an instant fan of the guy. I compared the quotes from the previous book, Right Ho, Jeeves which I consider to be the funniest of the series so far with this one. The former has more brilliant ones, so my initial opinion is still valid: when it comes to humor, book 7 (this one) is not quite on the level with book 6.So the final conclusion: good and at times funny one, but its length became its problem - 3 stars. I still want to continue reading the series.