Three Men in a Boat (Three Men, #1) in Catching up on Classics (and lots more!)

Oct 22, 2017 lethe rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: c-record-correct, g-humour, p-removed, l-eng, a-adult, g-classics, g-travel, s-summer, d-19th-c, s-spring

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 twic 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.

(view spoiler)[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) (hide spoiler)] ...more

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Sep 07, 2017 Kelly_Hunsaker_reads ... rated it liked it

Shelves: classics

I think I am not the most appreciative fan of comedy. I loved the TV show Friends, but really hated the movie Airplane. I like smart humor but do not like comedy that appeals to the baser intincts. And with this book choice I realized that I strongly prefer drama (thus my love of Steinbeck and duMaurier). I simply couldn't get into this book. ...more

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Jan 28, 2021 Julie rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: fin-2021, classic-novels

My expectations for this book were too high. I thought I would be reading an author similar to Wodehouse. It turns out that there is a reason Wodehouse is much more famous than Jerome.

To be sure, there were funny bits sprinkled throughout the book. However, the funny bits were overwhelmed by the boring bits. It's like Jerome wasn't quite sure what tone to take. At times it read like a children's history of England. At other times like a travel guide to towns on the Thames. Still other times like ...more

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Dec 18, 2016 Peggy rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: history, british

Three Men in a Boat, published in 1889, is a humorous take on a trip on the Thames from Hampton Court to Oxford. The hapless threesome compete to see who can do the least work and create the most misery for the others while discharging normal travel duties. There are occasional bits of history, some lovely literary descriptions, and many comic events. Unfortunately the Kindle version of the 1889 edition has no illustrations, which would have helped this reader to envision the two sculled skiff o ...more

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May 26, 2016 Mary rated it liked it

Shelves: historical-fiction, fluff, public-domain

A very meandering but occasionally hilarious proto-Wodehouse trip. It's not an actual story, having only bits of plots in a hundred or so anecdotes, but it was nice to see the early English shadows of Bertie Wooster & co. ...more

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