Reviewing "The Swoop!" by P.G. Wodehouse

“It will be news to the Man in the Street to learn that, with the possible exception of the Black Hand, the Scouts are perhaps the most carefully-organised secret society in the world.”

The Swoop is one of the few PG Wodehouse stories that does not involve:

     a) A love-stricken chap

     b) A beautiful girl

     c) An overbearing aunt

     d) Theft or attempted theft at a stereotypical country house

In fact, it is very unlike most PG Wodehouse books I’ve read, in that it doesn’t include a lot of the twists and turns and mistaken identities and broken engagements and other convoluted situations from which Jeeves is ever extricating Bertie Wooster.

Instead, this story is about Clarence Chugwater and his fellow Boy Scouts as they oust an invasion on England from…well, everyone. Despite being different from the other books I’ve read by Wodehouse, there are still the hijinks, the lightning-quick wordplay, and the over-the-top characters.

Reviewing "Tarzan of the Apes" by Edgar Rice Burroughs

It was one of the best authorial finds when I downloaded my first Edgar Rice Burroughs novel on Kindle. Frankly I did it for the reason of his novels being free rather than having heard anything good about them. But I was rewarded for my ignorant adventurousness with tons of action, adventure, strange characters and even stranger worlds. I sucked up the Barsoom series and The Land that Time Forgot and some of the Pellucidar books in a short period of time. Then, feeling I had found an author who could be consistently relied upon to turn out dime-novel adventure fare when I had the craving for it, I downloaded the Tarzan novels and saved them for just such an emergency.

I’ve never been a huge Tarzan fan from the movie adaptations I’ve seen (particularly the Disney animated one). But I figured I’d follow the standard rule of “Never judge a book by its movie,” and expected better things as I embarked on the first installment, Tarzan of the Apes.

A List of Recommended Winter Reads

In my previous post I explained the why Winter Reads are—or should be—different from the usual Summer Reading fare. Winter Reads should take advantage of the fact that (if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere like me) you are cooped up inside during long nights and cold days, and finally turn to those books that require a bit more focus and patience to appreciate. In this post I’ll present some books I’ve read in winters past. Without further ado, and in no particular order, my recommended winter readings include: