Three Men in a Boat: To Say Nothing of the Dog!

I read a review before purchasing this novel that comapred the three main charcters to Bertie Wooster from Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster series. If your familiar with those books, read no further because a more apt review doesn't exist. If you aren't, imagine being a fly on the wall during a trip down the river with three well meaning but clueless and often ill tempered men and a dog that lives to fight. Then imagine that, as you sit there, the narrator (okay, here the fly on the wall analogy breaks up) becaomes distracted constantly and the conversation wanders in and out of any number of bizzarre memories and you have some idea of this book. One word of warning though, while most of the pages are filled with hilarity, there are a few passages written with a sense of history the author wanted to impart straightforwardly and one passage that is very somber and sobering. Otherwise, you'll not regret having taken this trip down the Thames.

Three Men in a Boat: (To Say Nothing of the Dog) (Dover Value Editions) Three rather peculiar young Englishmen swan their holiday punting up the Thames. Their colorful adventures are in a soft and humorous key. It is partly a touring guide and partly a humorous introduction to the history of the villages and towns in their path, and partly about the foibles of the participants and their involvement with punting. Little lectures, little lesson, little family fictions all go to making this funny slim volume from 1889 a complete reading pleasure.

Where did the expression 'tongue in cheek' comes from? It must be that you cannot laugh outloud if your tongue is in your cheek--and you are biting it. If your goal is to surprise your listener (or reader) by piling absurdities on top of one another, be a trifle solomn to increase the contrast then, tongue in cheek, learn to write humor from this book. The reader starts to pile a chuckle on a guffaw until finally the milk goes up his nose, and snorting and weeping, the reader is reduced to nearly as much a simpering wreak as ... the beleagured heroes of this book. Three Victorian gentlemen rent a boat, take dog and prepare to punt gently through the English rivers. Nothing goes as planned, in part because of their confidence in their skills in nearly anything are misplaced. This is the funniest book I ever read, tempered by some lovely and romantic moments. If you liked the movie "The Gods Must be Crazy" with its set pieces of the Jeep and the Gate, the Jeep in the Tree, and the Scientist and the Picnic Table, you will love this book. If you laughed at "A Fish Called Wanda", you will love this book.

Imagine Bertie Wooster and two of his idiot friends out on a boat... with no Jeeves. That about describes "Three Men in a Boat : To Say Nothing of the Dog," Jerome K. Jerome's enchanting comic novel about three young men (to say nothing of the dog) who discover the "joys" of roughing it. The three men are George, Harris and the narrator, who are all massive hypochiandriacs -- they find that they have symptoms of every disease in existance (except housemaid's knee). To prop up their failing health, they decide to take a cruise down the Thames in a rented boat, camping and enjoying nature's bounty. Along with Monty -- an angelic-looking, devilish terrier -- the three friends set off down the river. But they find that not everything is as easy as they expected. They get lost in hedge mazes, end up going downstream without a paddle, encounter monstrous cats and vicious swans, have picnics navigate locks, offend German professors, and generally get into every kind of trouble they possibly can... Even though it was published more than a century ago, "Three Men in a Boat" remains as freshly humorous as when it was first published. While editor/playwright/author Jerome K. Jerome wrote a lot of other books, this book remains his most famous. And once you've read it, you'll see why. Jerome's real talent is in finding humor in everyday things, like trying to erect a tent in the woods, getting seasick, or questioning whether it's safe to drink river water. Written in Jerome's dry, goofy prose, these little occurrances become immensely funny. One of the funniest parts of the book is when the boys listen to a fishermen telling of his prowess, only to accidently knock down his record-breaking stuffed fish.... and discover it's made out of plaster. Oops. But Jerome takes a break from the humor near the end, when the boys find a drowned woman floating in the river. And here he becomes solemn and quietly compassionate: "She had sinned - some of us do now and then - and her family and friends, naturally shocked and indignant, had closed their doors against her." But back on the funny stuff. The capstone on all this humor is the "three men." These guys are basically pampered Victorian aristocrats, who have a romantic yearning for the great outdoors. You'll be laughing at them and with them, as they struggle through the basics of boating and camping. Funny, wacky and creepily true to life, "Three Men in a Boat" is an enduring comic classic in the vein of PG Wodehouse. Not to mention the dog!

This has to be one of the funniest books ever written beginning with the opening chapter where the narrator reads a medical book and decides he has every disease in the book. From there, he and his two best friends decide to get away from it all with a boat trip up the Thames River -- and that's the book. It's full of one hilarious episode after another with little side tidbits on the historical places they pass on the Thames. Those few who have found the book dull need to understand that the story is written at the pace of a boat trip and not a television sitcom. It's any vacation where everything goes hilariously wrong and if for once the tent doesn't fall down in a pouring rain or the boat manages to not run into another boat, the narrator remembers another trip and tells the story of carrying an incredibly smelly cheese home--Warning don't read that chapter in public. People will wonder why you're rolling on the ground laughing hysterically. There's also a dog who's idea of being helpful is bringing a dead rat to add to the stew. The only weakness of the book is that I'd like to have seen much more of the dog. On the serious side, Three Men in a Boat proves that humor based on human nature is timeless. Also on the serious side, if you want a good look at how people lived in 1890, this book actually gives a vivid picture, including the nostalgia that the narrator feels for "the good old days". He finds life in 1890 too fast paced and with too many inventions coming on too fast. It makes you wonder at what point people will look back to 2001 as "the good old days".