Timeless.


Bonus points for having a dog.

Generally, I consider myself not to have a literary sense of humour. Indeed, I have generally avoided books labelled 'Humour' because I see them as silly. I just don't find them to be funny. No chuckle. No guffaw. No smile.

I also have to admit that I find most other sources of humour rather uninteresting also. Stand-up comedians leave me flat. Sit-coms are just not funny. I do have a sense of humour. It just doesn't seem to be aligned with this particular time and place.

Now Florencia assured me that this was funny, at least to her weird sense of humour. As I tend to trust Florencia, I felt that I should give the book a try. Set off with the Three Men (and a dog) in a Boat, so to speak. I hoped not to be disappointed as I didn't want to lose faith in Florencia.

Well, there's a thing about this book. Though published in 1889, the humour is timeless. It's that sort of humour that one encounters while sitting in a boat with a couple of friends. Or maybe around a campfire on a canoe trip. Or maybe just while sitting with friends on a rainy day and from out of nowhere, wry one liners start popping up. Subtle humour that passes easily between friends followed by stories of past times together where equally terse humour bring smiles and smirks and, yes Florencia, even laughter. This is the kind of humour that lasts a lifetime or, perhaps, more than a century.

So Three Men in a Boat is, as Florencia says, "funny". So do read her review. It's so much better than this one.

What a quaint little book!

I had no idea this existed. But I'm definitely glad I could rectify that now.

The story is that of three friends, elderly gentlemen, who decide to journey up the Thames in a little boat together with the dog one of them owns. The preparations for the trip are already very entertaining, but the trip itself is no less so. Apart from them actually travelling for a bit, we are treated to various stops along the way (I looked a few places up on a map and was delighted to see there are indeed so many interesting places along the river). During the voyage as well as the stops, there are some reminiscences, childhood memories as well as later encounters, from all three. All while they are stumbling about. You might have guessed that not only do they encounter a bit of bad luck, their own helplessness and the fact that they don't actually know what they are doing isn't helping either.

The characters (the dog definitely being one of them) are very quirky. It's basically the story of three old(er) grumpy men travelling together with a dog, having some mishaps on the way. The way it was told was light and quite modern so the age of the book actually surprises.
Seeing society through the eyes of the three friends (and the dog) was very funny and the light way the story is told in that is nonetheless full of dry humour makes it clear why this book was an instant success back when it was first published.

Once again, I've chosen the audioversion and am glad for it because although I do not have the version narrated by Hugh Laurie, it was wonderful to have this story brought to life with the proper British accent.

Jeszcze nigdy nie czytałam równie specyficznej książki, ale podobała mi się!

Laugh-aloud hilarious! I felt as if I were tagging along, unobserved, on a boat trip with my brothers in the days of their youth (transposed back a century). The absurdities and ironies of the ordinary, things going wrong, anthropomorphism employed to great comic effect when boats and all their "cussed" paraphernalia seem to have minds of their own. Men showing off, embarrassments with girls, physical comedy, a bit of social commentary. The affectionate insults and jokes of three young buddies getting on each others' nerves.

Passages of purple prose about the scenery usually presaged a blunt come-down or outright disaster, as if the narrator were making fun of his own literary excess (and tendency to daydream and not pay attention to where he was steering) -- although sometimes those overdone descriptive passages seemed to be sweetly sincere expressions of awe or other emotion. But most of the prose is straightforward and modern. For an 1880s book this has aged amazingly well. The book might be even more enjoyable to someone who is actually familiar with England, the Thames River and her tributaries.

Thoroughly entertaining - I have not giggled at a book so much since reading the 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'. Amazing that the wit and the slapstick are as vivid for a book published in 1889. Fun, fun, fun. Makes me wish that there were more books about in the same vein this century.

This book is a strange mix. Part of it is of a particular kind of obvious humour. Sort of like watching a very pompous-looking person talking loudly into their cell-phone and paying no attention to where they are going and therefore fails to notice the banana skin everyone else has been avoiding. Bamm, down she goes, and hahaha, its just so funny, you have to laugh. There are also amusing incidents with the fox terrier Montmorency, whose chief pleasures in life seem to be fighting and hanging out with packs of street dogs. One gets the impression that JKJ wouldn't at all mind being reincarnated as an immoral, street-fighting, anarchic dog in the care of very liberal and approving owners.

The book is full of side-stories, none of them particularly interesting and some of them absolutely dire. Near the end was a highly-romanticised account of a woman with an illegitimate baby committing suicide by drowning. How the waters lovingly embraced her and gave her peace. That's what's wrong with this book. Highly amusing incidents intermixed with purple prose, a travelogue of some of England's most boring towns, and whatever struck the author as (I want to say interesting, but I don't believe it really) something that would fill in the narrative and be 'educational'. A good editor could cut this to a really wonderful funny book only about a third-long. In this case the abridged version would be a hell of a lot better than the original and I would have given it more than 3-stars.

So humour - 5 stars
Travelogue and lyrical pieces - 1 star
Montmorency - 3 stars

Av. 3 stars.

a taste:

the members have spoken: Three Men in a Boat will be our first group read. if it goes well, we can read other books together and see what we learn.

so, again, the point of our reading a book together is so we can all learn how to extract appeal factors from a text, and learn how to discuss books in a way that is relevant to a readers' advisory scenario.

the deadline for finishing the book is june 1st.
i will be posting some information on here from NoveList, which will be useful to glance over before starting the book, just to help get a sense of what kinds of things to be on the lookout for.

are we excited?

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okay - they changed my schedule this week, so i have to go in earlier than planned, but i will be able to pop in periodically to contribute the discussion.

so it's not about whether we liked it or not - for our own personal selves, that's great, but the questions that we should focus on are more: what are the appeal factors? what are the features of this book? to whom would we suggest this book? to whom would we absolutely not suggest this book? i posted some stuff in the thread directly below this if you are looking for some appropriate keywords/starting points.

and i will be back on ASAP...


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i would not recommend it to anyone looking for a prolonged narrative; it is definitely more a collection of episodic happenings.

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ummmmm no, i think it is very fast-paced. they are always bopping off to one thing or the other. there are sections where it slows down a little, when nature is described, but those sections are not very numerous


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you're not at all horrible!! this is how we are learning! and since it's just you and me there's no pressure!



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but it is a convenient frame to show off these characters in their laziness and quirkiness.

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i still think it is character-driven because it is the way these characters view their surroundings that drives the plot, and their innumerable asides...

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yeah, it's definitely a very specific type of humor. that's why RA is so difficult when it comes to humor because everyone's got their own ideas about what that means. so many people just don't respond to british humor.

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i think there are enough silly episodes for it to escape the highbrow label. "there's a man in my bed!!"
"what shall we put in the stew!!" "oh nooooo what is happening??"

ooh, and we forgot about writing style, which i think would be conversational, witty, and engaging

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see what a genius you are!! i didn't even remember your list (i am at work so a little distracted), i just went to the page. JEEEENIUS!


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well, there were parts of it that were slower; when i get home i will have my copy and will show examples. but slow-paced books tend to have a lot of description, and long passages where there is just no actual action happening. something can be fast-paced and not be riveting if you are just not into the story....

i will try to be clearer when i get home...

or someone with the book there can do it if they understand what i am trying to say...


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no, you are absolutely right. this book is something of an anomaly because the tone of it is so breezy and the sections are rather brief. maybe i am wrong though, this could be a whole discussion if anyone's game.

there's not really any cause-and-effect beyond each individual section, either, so i think it makes it seem more like tiny little stories stitched together. but this is just my impression


confused?? come hang out in my amazing RA group!! help me get better at leading discussions!!

http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/5...

3,5 stars



Honestly, I am here because of the delightful To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis made me see the light and realise that I simply cannot go on in my humble existence any more without reading this book.

And I have been putting off reading it ever since university days which are hidden in the mistily veiled paths of the distant past, etcetera.....

Also, as a Hungarian, I felt somewhat honour-bound to finally finish a book by an English author who was named after (Klapka in the "K.", in case you were not aware :) of one of our heroic generals in the Hungarian War of Indepence.

Was it worth the wait? Yes, mostly.

The three men in the boat (obviously in a dashing Victorian boating attire)



read like 3 times the quintessential Bertram Wilberforce Wooster, alas, without the inimitable Jeeves, and with a dog, who is quite a character, but does nothing to help, so you can imagine the shenanigans they get into.



JEEVES, WHERE ART THOU in their greatest hours of need?!

It made me chuckle and smile a lot, though I had to stop from time to time, as it proved just a bit too much occasionally.

Excellent narration by Ian Carmichael and currently this edition is included in the US Audible+ catalogue.

I first read this book about forty years ago, after watching an excellent BBC TV adaptation (1975). On second reading, I found myself smiling and occasionally laughing aloud at the jokes and slapstick scenes, and I believe those comic bits, now more than a century old, have held up very well. However, this prototypical buddy road trip (or river trip) up the Thames has a dark side that pops out at times before beating a hasty retreat behind its shield of jovial gags.

Three late Victorian, middle-class young Englishmen and the narrator’s dog take a boat trip up the Thames. Jerome used this narrative framework for a series of jokes, comic tales and slapstick scenes based on keen observations of human and canine behavior. There are jokes about the characters’ quirks and foibles, including, but not limited to, hypochondria, eating, drinking, cooking and sleeping habits, bad singing and even worse banjo playing, not to mention rowing, punting, sailing, fishing etc. often in a lazy, incompetent or reckless manner. As for the dog, his Fox Terrier nature gets him into scrapes and dangerous confrontations, most notably with a hot tea kettle and a tough old Tom cat. The slapstick scenes are many and varied; among the funniest is an attempt to open a can of pineapple chunks without a can opener. The Three Stooges couldn’t have done it better—or worse. And the scene where a bunch of tourists get lost in the maze at Hampton Court is priceless.

Jerome interweaves some poetic descriptions of the journey into his comic narrative. He also makes some philosophical observations, references to several historical sites, and even speculates on what people in 2088 will think of the commonplace objects of 1888. Will a cheap late Victorian knick-knack become a treasured antique?

As for the “dark side” I mentioned above. It comes out in the moodier descriptions of nature, and culminates in the sudden appearance of a dead woman floating downriver. The scene, which appears near the end of the story, is reminiscent of Thomas Hood’s poem, The Bridge of Sighs, about a young woman who drowned herself in the Thames. Moreover, the scene is foreshadowed by a dead dog spotted in the river. The scene with the dead dog is darkly humorous; the scene with the woman is deadly serious. The weather changes to reflect the mood; cold rain pours down from a gray sky. The friends tell morbid jokes about disease and death. They try to tough it out.
“On one point we were all agreed, and that was that, come what might, we would go through with this job to the bitter end. We had come out for a fortnight’s enjoyment on the river, and a fortnight’s enjoyment on the river we meant to have. If it killed us!”

But they’d had enough. The three men and a dog abandon the boat and board a train for London, where they enjoy a good meal (with the dog) and a show (sans canine).

God is Great !!!!

Miracles do happen!! I am born again believer.

This book was part of English classes as a reader and the teacher was particularly interested in making my life hard. In her classes my only memory was preparing to be sent out of class or shamed for my handwriting or similar… and of course raps on the knuckles with a ruler. To the extent I hated everything about English that year and barely managed a passing grade. This book was therefore a part of very bad memory. Thanks to everyone here on GR - over the last one year - I began to think maybe I am missing something. Oh boy !!! Did I …

This book a truly timeless and a rollicking ride - literally and otherwise. A travelogue of 3 friends who go down a river over a fortnight braving ‘life’ ( among many other things ). Each page is a description of the events that happen each day interspersed with multiple anecdotal stories and descriptions. The humour is amazing and I think even any one reads this later they would love it.

It’s a small book but each page needs to be savoured. Of course you need to do this voluntarily… and not treat this book like an ‘oldie’. Need I say anything other than HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

гумористичні замальовки про невдалу подорож Темзою трьох гіпертрофовано непристосованих до самостійного життя панів (і одного невихованого гавчика!) моя особиста затишна й тепла ковдрочка: сміявсь як і вперше, а може й навіть голосніше. обов’язково повернуся сюди ще, бо як можна нє?

на друге перечитування дуже здивувався кількості історичних посиланнячок та ліричних відступів, бо минулого разу вся ця гордовита піднесеність тексту промайнула повз мене. виявляється, книжка задумувалась як гід і тревелог, але Джером Клапка Джером десь надибав цілу купу файних анекдотів про тогочасний англійський побут, тож довелося робити pivot. найкраще рішення.

p.s. містер Поджер is my spirit animal