To Say Nothing of the Dog
Dec. 31st, 2006 12:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackHave you all read Three Men in a Boat (Jerome K Jerome) yet? Do so! It's the funniest book I've ever read, bar none. Three late-nineteenth-century young men take a boating holiday up the Thames, with many digressions, but the simplest things are described in such a way to leave you literally gasping for breath. Does anyone else agree or disagree?
To Say Nothing of the Dog is a time-traveling homage to that book, by Connie Willis. I love the set-up, with people madly running round half-cocked trying to achieve unlikely things and being impelled into Victorian boating holidays, and all of the echoes of TMiaB are well done; lots of touches and attitudes make me smile.
Unfortunately, I didn't really enjoy the book as a whole. It -- inevitably -- didn't capture a lot TMiaB's humour, and the style, while nice, never really made me laugh. The characters were pleasant, but I never really cared about them. So all in all, a nice book but a slight miss for me. However, I might try another book by Willis: I get the impression it could all come together very well if things were just a bit different.
To Say Nothing of the Dog is a time-traveling homage to that book, by Connie Willis. I love the set-up, with people madly running round half-cocked trying to achieve unlikely things and being impelled into Victorian boating holidays, and all of the echoes of TMiaB are well done; lots of touches and attitudes make me smile.
Unfortunately, I didn't really enjoy the book as a whole. It -- inevitably -- didn't capture a lot TMiaB's humour, and the style, while nice, never really made me laugh. The characters were pleasant, but I never really cared about them. So all in all, a nice book but a slight miss for me. However, I might try another book by Willis: I get the impression it could all come together very well if things were just a bit different.