Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog!) by Jerome K. Jerome
Endnotes by Jeremy Lewis
177 pages
Published 1889
Read from January 27 to January 30
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Whew. The second half of January has been dismal, as far as reading is concerned. Between Five Weeks in a Balloon, which took a week to finish, and Vonda N. McIntyre's The Moon and the Sun, which I began on January 17 and might not ever finish, my works have been clogged with dull, joyless books that have thrown my reading apparatus entirely out of whack. Even Three Men in a Boat, a thoroughly enjoyable trifle I should have been able to breeze through in a day and a half, tops, took four days to complete. I feel like I've forgotten how to read again, after two years of being very good about it.
I love the dry understatement of later Victorian humor, so most of this book was a delight, but after a while the comic digressions began to feel more wearisome than winsome. Most likely this is a result of my burned-out attitude toward reading after the unparalleled boredom of The Moon and the Sun, and not a reflection on the literary merits of Three Men. The earnest Romantic interludes warbling poetic about the beauties of nature are only to be expected in a Victorian work. The ending feels somewhat abrupt, as if Jerome ran out of steam and crammed the rest of the (fictionalized) river journey into a couple of pages, after all the digressions and anecdotes that had, perhaps, filled up his quota of words. Much of the book until that point had been laugh-out-loud funny, but the ending heightened a sense of unevenness and awkward pacing that left me somewhat unsatisfied.
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