A while back, I was reading To Say Nothing of the Dog, a cute sci-fi novel about traveling back to 19th century England. It’s dedication reads:

To Robert A. Heinlein

Who, in Have Space Suit — Will Travel,
first introduced me to Jerome K. Jerome’s
Three Men in a Boat,
To Say Nothing of the Dog

And throughout the book were littered direct references to Three Men in a Boat. So naturally I was curious and picked it up at the library.

It was great! Written in 1889, it details a trip down the Thames that the author, two friends, and his dog took. It is brimming with that delightful, uniquely English sense of irony and understatement. But I can’t sell it as well as a selection of some passages that caught my eye:

…I had just been reading a patent liver-pill circular, in which were detailed the various symptoms by which a man could tell when his liver was out of order. I had them all.

…I had the symptoms, beyond all mistake, the chief among them being “a general disinclination to work of any kind.”

What I suffer in that way no tongue can tell. From my earliest infancy I have been a martyr to it. As a boy, the disease hardly ever left me for a day. They did not know, then, that it was my liver. Medical science was in a far less advanced state than now, and they used to put it down to laziness.

“Why you skulking little devil, you,” they would say, “get up and do something for your living, can’t you?”–not knowing, of course, that I was ill.

And:

I called for the cheeses, and took them away in a cab. It was a ramshackle affair, dragged along by a knock-kneed, broken-winded somnambulist, which his owner, in a moment of enthusiasm, during conversation, referred to as a horse. I put the cheeses on the top, and we started off at a shamble that would have done credit to the swiftest steam-roller ever built, and all went merry as a funeral bell, until we turned the corner. There, the wind carried a whiff from the cheeses full on our steed. It woke him up, and with a snort of terror, he dashed off at three miles an hour. The wind still blew in his direction, and before we reached the end of the street he was laying himself out at the rate of nearly four miles an hour, leaving the cripples and stout old ladies simply nowhere.

And finally:

I like to watch an old boatman rowing, especially one who has been hired by the hour. There is something so beautifully calm and restful about his method. It is so free from that fretful haste, that vehement striving, that is every day becoming more and more the bane of nineteenth-century life. He is not for ever straining himself to pass all the other boats. If another boat overtakes him and passes him it does not annoy him; as a matter of fact, they all do overtake him and pass him–all those that are going his way. This would trouble and irritate some people; the sublime equanimity of the hired boatman under the ordeal affords us a beautiful lesson against ambition and uppishness.

Anyway, I recommend it. Wikipedia tells me that it was required reading in Soviet schools, so there’s that too.