=not as hilarious as I had hoped or was led to believe. Not entirely bad but I wouldn't recommend it.

Really funny; I laughed out loud a few times. Three Men in a Boat is better. The three men on a bummel ended up being a lot of joking about German culture, which was amusing, but not quite as silly as the first book.

Three young men are ruminating together on their various imagined illnesses and how much they need a holiday. Together with the dog, Montmorency, they hire a boat and travel up the Thames from London to Oxford and hilarity, as they say, ensues.

I found this to be a delightful book, very easy to read, picturesque and hardly dated in the language and humour. While I was reading it, I found it quite striking how it intersperses the comic antics of the protagonists with beautiful descriptions of the surrounding scenery and sometimes even some quite serious observations on life. This sounds like it should jar, but it mostly doesn't and works together remarkably well.

The narrative about boating sounded quite delightful and makes me want to gather up some fellows and spend a month sitting on the river myself!


My edition also contained the sequel, which I'll review here as well:

Three Men on the Bummel, by Jerome K. Jerome

This is the sequel to Three Men in a Boat and follows the same three protagonists (older and maybe wiser), sans dog, going for a bicycling trip around the Black Forest region of Germany.

I found this humorous enough, but not nearly as good as its predecessor. The humour seems somehow more forced, and the constant stereotyping of the German character soon gets wearing. But what I found myself missing the most, and I found this somewhat unexpected, was the Thames. I hadn't realised just how much of a character that the river had become in Three Men in a Boat and although Jerome tries his best with the German setting, it's just not the same.

Worth a read for curiosity value, but not as good as the original. (Three stars)

I can't finish it. I tried. I really tried. Some parts were brilliant and hysterical. But the vast majority read like a travel guide for late 1800's vacationers. It's possible that my ignorance of, and disinterest in, English history and geography kept me from enjoying this more.

(For Three Men on the Bummel.)

In brief: What better way to escape the wife and kids than to take a cycling tour of Germany?

Thoughts: This isn’t as much a straight-up sequel to Three Men in a Boat as it is an excuse for Jerome to tear into a whole new range of satirical topics—but it still a sequel. It features the same characters, about ten years later, on another misguided but ultimately benign bout of tourism, and with about the same level of self-awareness as before.

Less of the book takes place in Germany than I’d thought going in, and there Jerome focuses on “highlights” like the dog chasing a pig around a restaurant or the habit of German carters to fall asleep at the reins, rather than the day-to-day. Most of the rest of the book’s about the trio planning the trip and setting off, with digressions into other unfortunate past travel adventures, explanations for why things must be done a particular way, and generally exaggerating social foibles and expectations to poke fun at them. My favourite of these was probably the passage about how nobody is bike ads ever seems to be putting in any effort and how they were sexualized even then. My least favourite was probably the continued harping about how rule-abiding the Germans are, and how they’ll fine you for everything.

But it’s still a fun story with much the same silliness and spirit of Three Men in a Boat, though. A lot of the humour’s still funny and relatable—running for public transit, language education that fails utterly, that guy who absolutely knows how to fix your vehicle but actually doesn’t—though there are bits that haven’t aged well. For some reason Jerome throws in a passage with a Black stereotype, he seems really into informing us how fat the Germans are, and some of his comments probably sounded great before the two World Wars. That sort of thing.

But all in all, it’s an amusing book and a decent sequel, but it’s not a must-read. I definitely got a sense reading this that if it had been written today, it would’ve been somebody’s stand-up routine rather than a novel, and maybe that’s all you need to know, to know if you’ll like it.

To bear in mind: May offend some Germans. May offend some English people. Almost certainly will offend fat people. Contains an exceptionally outdated word for Black people, and some parody dialogue for both Black and Scottish people, spelled-out dialect and all. (The Black one is notably worse, because of course it is.)

7/10

It started with promise but that evaporated quickly. I guess it could be interesting for someone who is curious about 3 privileged gentleman in 1889 England taking holiday, boating on the Thames and what was on their minds but for me it was a yawn.

3.5 stars

In the beginning, the story was simple, 3 men decided to go on a journey and prepared all necessaries for that. Reading this book was like watching old funny cartoons. It was fun. I just love the side stories. The best one was Uncle Podger hanging a picture (I heard of it before reading this book. It was the main reason i read this boom)

Now, let's be serious. It is a heavy book. It took so ever to reach the end of the page, maybe because English is not my native language and maybe because it is a classic book.

I enjoyed reading it, but i could not finish it. I decided to stop reading it now and see if I will give it another shot later on.

DNF’d after the Introduction and first chapter. Too many books; too little time. If I want to read a Victorian-era comic travelogue, I’ll stick w/ Twain’s “Innocents Abroad.” At least I didn’t have to consult the notes to see why something was funny in “Innocents.”

Mildly amusing... A strong tendency to drift off-topic (early Stephen Fry). Still, an interesting glimpse of an era. The second book especially took my fancy, since it reflects British sentiments toward Germany before the Great War.

Read it 3 times over years and still plan to reread it some time. I laughed so much thanks to this wonderful, witty little novel. It tells a lot about life and how people often view about life. Life maybe simple, or it maybe super complicate, all's due to our thoughts. That's what I've learnt from this book.

A collection of classic writing by JKJ including not just his most famous work, Three men in a boat, but chapters from his Idle Thoughts Of an Idle Fellow, accounts of his attempts to break into acting and several others including my favourite, his account of what it’s like to live on a tiny houseboat. The person who cannot find at least something to smile or chuckle at in this collection is beyond help.

I read this book for the ATY 2021 Reading Challenge Week 2: The author has no A.T. or Y. in his name.
A reader must be in just the right mood to read a book touted as humorous. This one is and the humorous situations stand the test of time...this is set in the 19th century, after all. But I encountered many laugh out loud funny situations in reading it. You could, also, just pick it up and start.