A curious tale that requires the reader to enjoy Old English vocabulary due to the time frame of the story. While I normally enjoy British humor such as Wodehouse or other contemporary authors, I struggled with this one. It's a quick read with lots of vintage illustrations which in my opinion could have been left out. Another one bites the dust!

First off, the whole time I was reading this book a Monty Python sketch was running through my head. The story reminded me of "The Upperclass Twit of The Year Contest". This may be spoilerish, but you know the saying how many people does it take to change a lightbulb. It this story it was how many people does it take to hang a picture. My was that hilarious.

Also, some of the antidotes about the narrarators dog are side splitters.

Summary (from Wikipedia)

Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), published in 1889, is a humorous account by English writer Jerome K. Jerome of a two-week boating holiday on the Thames from Kingston upon Thames to Oxford and back to Kingston. The book was initially intended to be a serious travel guide, with accounts of local history along the route, but the humorous elements took over. One of the most praised things about Three Men in a Boat is how undated it appears to modern readers – the jokes seem fresh and witty even today.

Review
I laughed out loud at some of the antics of these three. Picture this: Three men who have forgotten to pack a can-opener trying to break into a tin of pineapple. Once they have beaten it into every shape known to man (and a few more besides) with a rock and an oar, one of them, bruised and bleeding by now, imagines he sees the leering face of the Devil himself in the twisted lump of metal and flings it far out into the river.
The book frequently veers off the main topic to areas that did not seem relevant to the trip. That was a distraction for me, but maybe not for someone else. At 102 pages, it is a quick read and entertaining.

3.5 stars but recorded on GR as 3.

It looked like a breezy read, a good-natured gently comical novel. Certainly it is not at all hard to read but nevertheless, this book was a grind for me to get through. Humorous novels suffer a great disadvantage in that I tend to expect to find something to laugh at on each every page. This is quite a tall order and very hard for most books to accomplish. P.G. Wodehouse, Oscar Wilde, Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett often make me laugh with their fiction but generally I try to avoid comedy novels. I prefer humour to be a facet of the novel rather than the focus. Novels which are based on plots, thrills and characterization, including serious novels often make me laugh when the author slip in humorous scenes or dialogue at unexpected moments. This help to balance the overall tone of the book for me. Dickens is often funny somewhere in his long novels, even Victor Hugo's Les Mis has funny bits.

With Three Men in a Boat I am surprised to find that the humour totally fell flat for me. I find the humour in this book is very tame, very polite and centered on the silliness of the protagonists, particularly the narrator. The style of narration is also rather whimsical, going off on tangents with little supposedly comical vignettes every few paragraphs. Unfortunately, I did not find any of it funny. The characters are indeed suitably silly but there is no depth to them, they are all self-absorbed and I could not work up any interest in their antics. Tomfooleries like getting up late, waiting for a defiant kettle to boil, drinking horrible tea and whatnot leave me cold.

The entire enterprise seems completely pointless from beginning to end, and not a single chuckle escaped me. OK, it is a beloved classic which has been in print for more than a century so I have to respect it for that. If you find it funny I respect that too, but humour is very subjective and I subjected myself to this. Ah well, what you gonna do?

https://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2014/...

I love To Say Nothing of the Dog. Adore it enough to own two copies, a paperback for reading/ lending, and a hardcover for keepsies. Love it enough, in fact, to write a ridiculous review comparing it to a Beethoven symphony (my review). Willis dedicated her book to Heinlein, who “introduced me to Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat.” So when I saw Project Gutenberg offered Three Men in a Boat, I snatched it up.

It is the time of year when I don’t have much time to devote to reading, particularly not long, involved plots with thirty-four funky character names, taking place in imaginary worlds I can’t pronounce (or even in this one, Mr. Jonathan Strange). Three Men seemed perfect for the kind of read I was looking for, and it turned out to be true. But I’m viewing it through the fond lens of a reader of To Say Nothing of the Dog, whose author was clearly amused by Three Men in a Boat, whose own author was riffing on other Victorian tales. So it’s all a bit meta, and I can’t really tell if I love it, or just the spiderweb of connections I feel with the authors.

Let me be honest: there’s virtually no plot. It’s an uneven narrative, flagrantly digressive, in which Bertie, I mean, Jerome, George, William Harris–to say nothing of the dog, Montmorency–are interacting in an Abbott and Costello sort of way as they plan, travel and conclude an idyllic boat ride down the Thames. Narrated by Jerome, the details of the trip are frequently interrupted with humorous asides, commentary on the sights of the Thames and musing on historical sites they are passing. Characterization is about all that holds it together– detail on historical events near the Thames, is frankly, rather yawners, as I am indifferent student of historical events (signing of the Magna what?).

And yet Three Men in a Boat amused me. It could have been the beginning, in which

“We were sitting in my room, smoking, and talking about how bad we were–bad from a medical point of view I mean, of course. … With me, it was my liver that was out of order. I knew it was my liver that was out of order, because I had just been reading a patent liver-pill circular, in which were detailed the various symptoms by which a man could tell when his liver was out of order. I had them all. It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medical advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form.“

Though written in 1889, it indirectly emphasized to me, a nurse, that the more things change, the more they stay the same. I think that’s why the characterization appeals so much. The three men bear a strong resemblance to people we all know; in fact, I was rather reminded of Jerry, George and Kramer, whose own self-absorbed behavior provided so many laughs. For instance, after Jerome tells a story about another man watching him work, he comments:

“Now, I’m not like that. I can’t sit still and see another man slaving and working. I want to get up and superintend, and walk round with my hands in my pockets, and tell him what to do. It is my energetic nature. I can’t help it.“

As a dog person, I couldn’t get enough of the sassy, spirited Montmorency:

“We went downstairs to breakfast. Montmorency had invited two other dogs to come and see him off, and they were whiling away the time by fighting on the doorstep. We calmed them with an umbrella, and sat down to chops and cold beef.“

But it wasn’t all irony and laughter, there were moments of quite lyrical, perhaps even indulgent writing (to take a line from Willis: “a tendency to maudlin sentimentality, like… a Victorian poet cold-sober”):

“In the sunlight–in the daytime, when Nature is alive and busy all around us, we like the open hillsides and the deep woods well enough: but in the night, when our Mother Earth has gone to sleep, and left us waking, oh! the world seems so lonesome, and we get frightened, like children in a silent house.The we sit and sob, and long for the gas-lit streets, and the sound of human voices, and the answering throb of human life. We feel so helpless and so little in the great stillness, when the dark trees rustle in the night-wind.“

Without doubt, it kept me entertained. Read in small doses before bedtime, it perhaps started to feel a little like the three men experiencing the Thames: interesting, humorous, thoughtful, and perhaps just a day or two too long. Hopefully, the above quotes give enough of a flavor to see if it will appeal. For me, I’m looking forward to my next read of To Say Nothing of the Dog; with the insight I’ve gotten from Three Men, I expect it to be even more amusing.

This isn't really about three men in a boat, it is about Jerome being funny.

The Victorian predecessor to PG Wodehouse. Good stuff that provided a few chuckles. Although it wanders into travel guide territory on occasion, a close reading does pay off now and then with extra laughs.

The story starts off with a man feeling out of sorts with his London life and leafing through a medical dictionary. Quickly he realises that he is suffering from every single aliment described - with the exception of washerwoman's elbow. He rushes off to see the doctor who listens to his story and prescribes him a simple holiday with a pork chop and two pints of beer daily for dinner.

So begins a classic of southern English humour. What strikes me how contemporary the basic set up still feels. An indefinable wrongness and dissatisfaction with daily life, the Doctor in this case acting not as a medical expert but as an embodiment of wisdom. The solution - being forced to appreciate the basic pleasures of life, which as the story unfolds are more than just pork chops and beer  I hasten to add to reassure those who are not keen on either  but more generally an awareness of everyday absurdity.

The journey of three men and a dog in a boat along the Thames prides a basic framework from which all kinds of comic set pieces can be hung. Rather than go into those struggles with a recalcitrant boat and the fishermen's delight in spinning sagas I'll tell a different story that I heard at a funeral some years ago. The speaker was remembering his deceased friend who we were laying to rest that day and how when they were all young they decided in the spirit of Three Men in a Boat to travel along the Thames (although admittedly without a dog). Anyhow after a particularly long and tiring day they came ashore by a pub, a very fancy and particular looking establishment to be sure, and one of them went in and asked the barman for three pints of beer.

With more than a slight sneer the barman said "we don't serve pints here".
To which the traveller in all innocence replied "oh, well, in that case can I have six halves please".

As it happens in case anybody thinks such stories are too remote from reality to be possibly true I'll add one of my own. With a colleague at the end of a working day we stopped at a public house, my colleague would invariably have a pint of a very commercial lager which I shall forbear to advertise, while I would apparently look for the meaning of life and so would happen on what ever suggested itself to me and so I asked for beer x ' oh ' quoth the young serving lad 'such beer is too terribly strong, we only serve it by halves', 'fine, I'll have two halves and a pint glass, then' to which request the lad complied. As perhaps you can imagine, the absurdities added most decidedly to the enjoyment of the drink.

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)

It has a nice cover illustration,and it is pretty much the only thing I like about this book.

A chapter from this book was part of my college English course,otherwise I would probably not have been familiar with it.

Mercifully,it was a short chapter.Three friends
all hypochondriacs,take a boat trip along the Thames river.They talk about their illnesses.

Though this is a supposedly a humour classic,I didn't find it funny.Despite trying hard,I couldn't finish it.

Abandoned.

The publisher’s summary for this edition does the best job of describing the book that I’ve read yet. My one sentence version: Reflections on a boat trip up the Thames in 1889 by three young men, accompanied by a fox terrier, along with side observations on events such as the effect on an entire household of one man’s efforts to hang a picture.

When I first read this some 40 years ago I marveled at the extent to which Jerome’s descriptions of these small experiences in his life were not only wildly entertaining, but were not that different from my own. His thoughts on the persistent tendency of tow ropes to tangle themselves without human intervention echoed my own with regard to garden hoses, for instance.

This feeling is even more pronounced today: the way in which J, the main character, diagnoses himself with every disease he comes across (with the exception of housemaids’ knee) as he reads through a medical dictionary is pretty similar to my efforts at finding an explanation for any symptom I may be experiencing using Dr. Google.

In short, the book has retained its charm for me, as I think it will for most people who enjoy, say The Importance of Being Ernest or HMS Pinafore. If you’re not fond of that particular style of British humor, this will probably not be your cup of tea.

To be clear, the book is not cover to cover humor, English-style or otherwise. From time to time Jerome waxes on in purple prose about nature, or what it means to be an Englishman. There are two reasons this was not the problem for me that has been for others. For one thing, these passages (especially the commentary on the history associated with points along the river) were a nice break between the comic sections. More importantly, I think they are part of the overall picture the book paints of a 20-something Londoner with a comfortable existence in the 1880’s. This young man, chock full of amusing anecdotes, also harbors lyrical, sometimes maudlin, thoughts about himself and his country.

One last thing - the narration by Steven Crossley is a great match for the content.

I listened to Huge Laurie reading an abridged version of Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men and a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog).

Before you ask, Channing Channing of the Chesterfield Channings came into being in my head long before I had even heard of Jerome K. Jerome. However, listening to the book yielded up the following passage that I enjoyed so much I had to immediately look it up on the interwebs.

The order of the procession was as follows:

Montmorency, carrying a stick.
Two disreputable-looking curs, friends of Montmorency's.
George, carrying coats and rugs, and smoking a short pipe.
Harris, trying to walk with easy grace, while carrying a bulged-out Gladstone bag in one hand and a bottle of lime-juice in the other.
Greengrocer's boy and baker's boy, with baskets.
Boots from the hotel, carrying hamper.
Confectioner's boy, with basket.
Grocer's boy, with basket.
Long-haired dog.
Cheesemonger's boy, with basket.
Odd man carrying a bag.
Bosom companion of odd man, with his hands in his pockets, smoking a short clay.
Fruiterer's boy, with basket.
Myself, carrying three hats and a pair of boots, and trying to look as if I didn't know it.
Six small boys, and four stray dogs.

When we got down to the landing-stage, the boatman said: "Let me see, sir; was yours a steam-launch or a house-boat?"

On our informing him it was a double-sculling skiff, he seemed surprised.

~ Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men and a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), 1889

The marvelous thing about the above excerpt, is the window it gives into country village life in the late 1800s. I was so charmed by it that I was derailed for hours investigating the different mongers and their produce. Look for a tiny ode to the cheesmonger's boy to show up in the last scene of the first Finishing School Book the First: Etiquette & Espionage.