Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome

Take three wasters who love their food, and a drop to drink, much more than any kind of effort; who are hypochondriacs, mischief-makers, and inveterate liars (er, sorry, story-tellers). Make sure that they like to show off, philosophise, bicker, and pontificate, while being largely incompetent. Put them in a small boat with an angelic-looking but evil-minded dog, give them frying pans, tents, kettles full of butter, lemons, but absolutely no cheese (that's very important, and I'll explain later), and send them off down the Thames for a week. Sound like fun so far? I think I'd rather walk over hot coals than actually be stuck in the boat with them, ...  Read the complete review

I’m sure you’ll already have heard of Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome. I’m sure you’ll have also heard how brilliant it is. Well, if you haven’t, let me tell you. If you have, let me tell you anyway. The narrator is a medical curiosity – when he reads the medical dictionary, he finds that he has every condition ever diagnosed – with perhaps the exception of housemaid’s knee… Along with his two friends George and William (and Montmorency, the dog), and realising that men such as they need a holiday to cope with the stresses and strains of doing nothing every day, they plan a cruise down the Thames. No sooner is that decided, of course, than they all ...  Read the complete review

A book that can make you laugh out loud is without doubt a very rare, and a very good thing - and this is the only one that I can remember reading that has done so consistently. It is the tale of three young men - the author (J.), George and Harris, together with the dog, Montmorency - who decide, after a bout of sustained hypochondria, to hire a boat and row up the Thames for two weeks, as a way of revitalising themselves. Of course they get into various little scrapes and mishaps - steam launches, locks and cats all get in the way - and these are recounted in such a dry and caustic style that you can't help yourself but laugh. The human characterisations ...  Read the complete review

'Three Men in a Boat' is so funny as to be painful to read. It's great that it got reissued with a modern cover (mine has the one pictured here) because it might get people's blinkers off about it being a classic and just introduce it as a superb work of comic fiction. All of the characters are very well drawn, and the various encounters they have with rivergoers very funny, but what makes it is the worldly-wise, ironic tone that suffuses every page, the endless diversions and distractions which make even the simplest of moments take pages to actually describe (they take a good while to get into the boat). Think Blackadder, think Monty Python, ...  Read the complete review

Three men, a boat, 1 dog, luggage, food, the river.............a perfect setting for much farce and antics which Jerome describes so well. Having decided that they were not well, indeed having refered to a medical dictionary decided that they were suffereing from all ailments except for housemaids knee, to which they took great offence and wondered what on earth could be wrong with them that they weren't suffering from it, the friends decide eventually on a boat trip up the Thames to get some well earned rest. However from the packing of the luggage to the attempts at cooking, the cheerful banter to the bickering, the floating along through the lovely ...  Read the complete review