A quick and funny read! The three men have a hilarious adventure in a boat on the Thames river.

It's hard for me to put into words how much I love this book. I've used it as a talisman for a good year since my early twenties. 

Each year has to begin with Jerome on his boat. 

The book tells the tale of three friends who spend their summer rowing up the Thames, a past time they all love and do all the time. 

However, life on the water is never as simple as we're led to believe. Jerome tells us in great detail of every misadventure he'd had with his merry band of brothers (and his scrappy little terrier) which include misbehaving equipment, disappearing lockgates, bad weather, strange boat people, steam launches, and the beautiful towns along the ancient River.

I always feel that the basic premise of this book is having Jerome hold out his hand, and say, "Come...walk the world with me". You're never quite the same when you come back to your own life on dry land.

If I could give this book a million stars, it still wouldn't be enough.

I absolutely love the book “Three Men in a Boat” by Jerome K. Jerome. It is so LOL funny but so full of truth. (Apparently his mother had a little humor in naming her son.)
Three friends decide to take a boat trip down the River Thames and begin their planning by listing all the things they must take with them. They quickly realize all their things are going to sink the boat and that the “useless” should be thrown overboard. Failure to do so would only bring anxiety and worry.

“Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need—a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing. You will find the boat easier to pull then, and it will not be so liable to upset, and it will not matter so much if it does upset; good, plain merchandise will stand water. You will have time to think as well as to work. Time to drink in life’s sunshine—time to listen to the Æolian music that the wind of God draws from the human heart-...” Chapter 3

The book becomes a metaphor for how we should live our lives.

(Image: Three Men in a Boat painting by Winslow Homer)

This short novel is about three dudes who decide to take what they assume will be a relaxing and rejuvenating boat trip up the Thames. 

They are in need of a rest because it was oh-so-tough to be a rich person of leisure in England in the 19th century. 

There are a few amusing incidents which elicited a smile and, less often, a chuckle. There are also boring parts and supposed-to-be-funny-but-are-not parts. 

I most enjoyed, in the beginning, when Jerome (the main character's name is the same as the author's) self-diagnoses with the aid of a medical encyclopedia:

"The diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly with all the sensations I have ever felt.". (Ring a bell, anyone?)

Every single disease, with the exception of housemaid's knee, he realizes he's suffering from. (Dr. Google at your service!)

"There were no more diseases after zymosis so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me."

It is a dry sort of humor, the kind I like most, and yet the mishaps that fall upon these men - or they bring upon themselves - just aren't that funny. 

The guys take Montmorency, a fox terrier, along and I wish there'd been more about him. He was more interesting than those dolts whose company he found himself in.

Remember I said about the supposed-to-be-funny-but-are-not parts? Here's a for instance. Poor Montmorency gets injured by a tea kettle full of hot water. 

That just makes me think of the stupid videos on 'America's Funniest Videos' that are anything but funny, just a bunch of people and animals getting hurt or scared.

So.... ho-hum and a diddle, diddle, dee.

I finally finished this last night. It had been my bedtime reading for the past four weeks and I kept falling asleep after one or two pages. I found it surprisingly heavy-going for such a light romp.

I appreciate that the book was first published in 1889, but since it has become a classic in the humour genre I hadn't expected the jokes to be so stale. Practically everybody else in the group loved it, though, so I'm sure it's me. I don't care for P.G. Wodehouse either.

I smiled perhaps once or twice at something funny, there were two passages of musings I really enjoyed (quoted in full in the spoilers below), and I liked Montmorency the fox-terrier, but there was not nearly enough of him. Even the subtitle (To Say Nothing of the Dog) was missing from my edition.

Quotes:

Such is life; and we are but as grass that is cut down, and put into the oven and baked.
To go back to the carved-oak question, they must have had very fair notions of the artistic and the beautiful, our great-great-grandfathers. Why, all our art treasures of today are only the dug-up commonplaces of three or four hundred years ago. I wonder if there is any real intrinsic beauty in the old soup-plates, beer-mugs, and candle-snuffers that we prize so now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing around them that gives them their charms in our eyes. The 'old blue' that we hang about our walls as ornaments were the common every-day household utensils of a few centuries ago; and the pink shepherds and the yellow shepherdesses that we hand round now for all our friends to gush over, and pretend they understand, were the unvalued mantel-ornaments that the mother of the eighteenth century would have given the baby to suck when he cried.
Will it be the same in the future? Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimney-pieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd? Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house?
That china dog that ornaments the bedroom of my furnished lodgings. It is a white dog. Its eyes are blue. Its nose is a delicate red, with black spots. Its head is painfully erect, its expression is amiability carried to the verge of imbecility. I do not admire it myself. Considered as a work of art, I may say it irritates me. Thoughtless friends jeer at it, and even my landlady herself has no admiration for it, and excuses its presence by the circumstance that her aunt gave it to her.
But in 200 years' time it is more than probable that that dog will be dug up from somewhere or other, minus its legs, and with its tail broken, and will be sold for old china, and put in a glass cabinet. And people will pass it round and admire it. They will be struck by the wonderful depth of the colour on the nose, and speculate as to how beautiful the bit of the tail that is lost no doubt was.
We, in this age, do not see the beauty of that dog. We are too familiar with it. It is like the sunset and the stars: we are not awed by their loveliness because they are common to our eyes. So it is with that china dog. In 2288 people will gush over it. The making of such dogs will have become a lost art. Our descendants will wonder how we did it, and say how clever we were. We shall be referred to lovingly as 'those grand old artists that flourished in the nineteenth century, and produced those china dogs'.
The 'sampler' that the eldest daughter did at school will be spoken of as 'tapestry of the Victorian era', and be almost priceless. The blue-and-white mugs of the present-day roadside inn will be hunted up, all cracked and chipped, and sold for their weight in gold, and rich people will use them for claret cups; and travellers from Japan will buy up the 'Presents from Ramsgate', and 'Souvenirs of Margate', that may have escaped destruction, and take them back to Jedo as ancient English curios. (p. 62-63)

The Cistercian monks, whose abbey stood there in the thirteenth century, wore no clothes but rough tunics and cowls, and ate no flesh, nor fish, nor eggs. They lay upon straw, and they rose at midnight to mass. They spent the day in labour, reading, and prayer; and over all their lives there fell a silence, as of death, for no one spoke.
A grim fraternity, passing grim lives in that sweet spot, that God had made so bright! Strange that Nature's voices all around them — the soft singing of the waters, the whisperings of the river grass, the music of the rushing wind — should not have taught them a truer meaning of life than this. They listened there, through the long days, in silence, waiting for a voice from heaven; and all day long and through the solemn night it spoke to them in myriad tones, and they heard it not. (p. 140-141)

Uhhh a mogło być tak dobrze. Anegdota na dygresji i anegdocie. Tak tego dużo, że nie widac już nawet wątku głównego. Nie moja lektura :(

Okay. Right from the beginning, it is a hilarious thing to read. This book was written in 1889, and it is still too funny. According to what I read, at first, it was going to be a travel guide, but that got lost among the humorous anecdotes that took over the whole book. I thank you, Jerome, for that.

So, three men (with a dog) started talking about how ill they were, almost like a contest on who was in the worst shape ever. And then, Jerome said his liver was out of order. Without visiting any doctor, he affirmed that his liver was out of order. How did he know that? Because he read a patent liver-pill circular, in which were detailed all the symptoms. And that single thing was my first hypochondriacal (is that a word?) laugh. I mean, don't most people do that? They feel unwell so they start looking for information, and suddenly they are writing a will because they KNOW it is their last week on earth. Then, if they have any time left, they visit the doctor. So, Jerome read that circular, and on another opportunity, went to the British Museum with the single purpose of reading about diseases (now, we have Wikipedia...).

Anyway, every paragraph is filled with amusing lines; not stupid funny, but witty funny. The thoughts of these hypochondriacs are written in such a way that you are entertained all the way through. Who never experienced "a general disinclination to work of any kind"? Poor boy, he was not lazy, it was his liver!

So, after all this chatting and feeling sorry for themselves, they arrived to the conclusion that all those maladies were caused by overwork. That is why they decided to take a boating holiday. While describing the trip, the author shared a lot of hilarious anecdotes. And I mean, a lot.

The one thing I didn't like that much is the fact that this story seems to be told by a weird creature I named "Seinlet": there can be a funny paragraph narrated by a hilarious Seinfeld and the next one can be so dramatic like a dying Hamlet. It is an abrupt change and I was a bit lost. Jerome’s funny writing and the poetic writing are really good, if they are far, far away from each other, like in different books or something... Otherwise, it can be confusing. At least, it was for me.

"I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever - read the symptoms - discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it - wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus's Dance - found, as I expected, that I had that too, - began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically - read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright's disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid's knee.
I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn't I got housemaid's knee? Why this invidious reservation?"

"From the dim woods on either bank, Night's ghostly army, the grey shadows, creep out with noiseless tread to chase away the lingering rear- guard of the light, and pass, with noiseless, unseen feet, above the waving river-grass, and through the sighing rushes; and Night, upon her somber throne, folds her black wings above the darkening world, and, from her phantom palace, lit by the pale stars, reigns in stillness.
"…we fall asleep beneath the great, still stars, and dream that the world is young again - young and sweet as she used to be ere the centuries of fret and care had furrowed her fair face, ere her children's sins and follies had made old her loving heart - sweet as she was in those bygone days when, a new-made mother, she nursed us, her children, upon her own deep breast - ere the wiles of painted civilization had lured us away from her fond arms, and the poisoned sneers of artificiality had made us ashamed of the simple life we led with her, and the simple, stately home where mankind was born so many thousands years ago."

"But there, everything has its drawbacks, as the man said when his mother-in-law died, and they came down upon him for the funeral expenses."

I can quote hundreds of passages. My favorite parts are the funny ones, of course. Oh my, how I laughed. I am out of synonyms for “funny” (I think you noticed that). Jerome, you are a new safe place for me.

This is a solid 4.5-star book.



Note: I read this book many months ago... I'm trying to catch up with my reviews.

Aug '13
* Also on my blog.

It turns out that I only identify as a woman in 2023 and that my true self is a late Victorian gentleman with a ropey sense of humour. Who knew? Those that know me probably had an inkling when the weak puns in The Diary of a Nobody had me crying with laughter and still chuckling to myself a longer-than-is-seemly while later.
The book is about so many things that are important to me, a journey along the Thames (I am a born and enamoured Londoner), friendship, dogs and the need to sometimes just escape from the humdrum of life. Fortunately for me it is not a travelogue, despite there being some beautiful descriptions of the countryside and villages they pass through and some historical background to said places it is more about the joy and niggles that come with spending a holiday with your best friends.
As with DoaN, I laughed aloud often, much to the annoyance of those unfortunate enough to be around me, as I saw myself or people I know in so many of the situations they describe. (Like Harris I cannot sing, forget the words or more commonly replace the words with what I think they are,
n  ”You don’t expect a man to never remember more than the first three lines of the first verse, and to keep repeating these until it is time to begin the chorus. You don’t expect a man to break off in the middle of a line, and snigger, and say, it’s very funny, but he’s blest if he can think of the rest of it…”n

We may have over 100 years of technological advance but Jerome’s description of a man setting out to hang a picture which turns into an epic involving every family member hunting for the tools, minor injuries, lost glasses until the picture is hung, wonkily, on a wall several hours later is a pretty accurate account of any job that has been undertaken either by my father when I was a child or in my current home,
n  Then we had to find the rule and the string again, and a new hole was made; and, about midnight, the picture would be up – very crooked and insecure, the wall for yards round looking as if it had been smoothed down with a rake, and everybody dead beat and wretched- except Uncle Podger.”n

In other curiously modern episodes we see the British Library substituted for Google search in helping our narrator discover that he is suffering from every ailment bar Housemaid’s Knee while looking up a treatment for hayferver,
n  ”I sat for a while frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever – read the symptoms- discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it – wondered what else I had got; turned up St Vitus’s Dance – found, as I suspected, that I had that too…”n

that Reading has always been a shithole,
n  “Even Reading, though it does its best to spoil and sully and make hideous as much of the river as it can reach, is good-natured enough to keep its ugly face a good deal out of sight.”n

and that the right to roam and antagonistic landowners are always a fraught coupling,
n  “Where it is really the owners that are to blame, they ought to be shown up. The selfishness of the riparian proprietor grows with every year. If these men had their way they would close the river Thames altogether. They actually do this along the minor tributary streams and in the backwaters. They drive posts into the bed of the stream, and draw chains across from bank to bank, and nail huge notice-boards on every tree.”n

I adored this book from start to finish as is evident from the amount of quotes I have included (and my phone is full of many more that I couldn’t include without transcribing the whole book). It’s a wonderful testament to friendship, to the Thames and to the foibles of human nature remaining constant despite the changing times. A true joy to read and I urge everyone to do so.

The image of Uncle Podger hanging a painting and Harris singing the comic song will forever be etched in my mind. Hilarious novel!
Even better the second time round.

I decided to read this because (a) I was in the mood for something quite light, (b) it was one of those fairly famous books I have always been moderately curious about, and (c) it being in the public domain means it’s available as a free download on Kindle. A word of warning on the last point - if you go for the free edition you miss the book’s illustrations (which is a shame, but still, many thanks to the volunteers who convert these books into digital form).

Most people will be familiar with the book’s premise. The enervated author and his two equally listless chums, Harris and George (the last actually has a job, though one where he “goes to a sleep at a bank from ten to four each day, except Saturdays, when they wake him up and put him outside at two”) decide that a boat trip up the Thames would do them good. They are accompanied by the author’s dog, Montmorency, and the adventure is told in humorous style.

I actually quite enjoyed it, perhaps a bit more than I expected to. I might have given it four stars but at times I found the author’s humour a bit over the top. He had a fondness for taking a humorous concept and exaggerating it to the point of absurdity. In Scotland where I live there was a well-known TV comedy show of a few years ago, that featured two characters who regularly did the same, to the point where one (always the same one) would suddenly scowl at his friend and say “You’ve taken that too far”. I had the same feeling at several points during this narrative.

Still, the book gave me about half-a-dozen lol moments, which is not bad, and the rest of it is mildly amusing. Worth a try if you are looking for something in this genre.

La lettura gusta al momento giusto, carino, spensierato leggero, per non pensare, un umorismo datato molto educato ma comunque apprezzabile.
Nato per essere una specie di guida turistica per risalire il corso del Tamigi venne espunto dall’editore delle parti più storiche e geografiche e diventò un racconto di humor squisitamente british.
Tre amici decidono di passare in barca un weekend lungo il corso del fiume, la convivenza forzata sulla barca, la loro imperizia quasi totale di navigazione i caratteri divergenti creano un siparietto molto divertente, pieno di gag e situazioni grottesche e i tre sembrano un po’ come componenti di una coppia sul viale del tramonto che non si sopporta più.
Alcuni episodi veramente spassosi:
Come quando montano una tenda sotto la pioggia e si intrecciano tra corde tese picchetti e regole della fisica che traballano, oppure la gag della moka (o del bollitore del tè tanto sono intercambiabili) regola che seguo costantemente: girare sempre le spalle alla moka sul fornello e ignorarla, così il caffè uscirà più in fretta.
E poi c’è Montmorency il buffo fox terrier che affronta il gatto: risulta evidente la superiorità del felino rispetto al cane che nonostante tutta la sua tracotanza soccombe in maniera quasi umiliata dinnanzi al gatto che con nonchalance e naturale altezzosità lo rimette al suo posto, sconfitta schiacciante e senza appello 1 a 0 per il mondo felino… eh sì perché il mondo si divide in due categorie: chi è di gatto e chi è di cane con eccezionali scivolamenti nell’una o nell’altra preferenza.

Maybe 3.5. Very silly, a bit odd and thoroughly enjoyable,