Three Men in a Boat
Three feckless young men take a rowing holiday on the Thames river in 1888. Referenced by Robert A. Heinlein in Have Spacesuit Will Travel as Kip's father's favorite book. Inspired To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis.
Stats for nerds
24recommend
37mentions
33people
2009–2026years
70% recommend30% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Similar experience w/ my daughter (now 12 y/o) here. We read the heck out of children's books when she was little. There were nights when I really didn't want to slog thru the same Suzy Spafford[6] book again, but I did it anyway. I think it paid off. My daughter is an avid reader now.
She says she still wants me to read to her, so I do. This year was a bit sci-fi heavy, and we've decided to target more fantasy and literature in 2026.
This year's books included:
"Below the Root", "And All Between", and "Until the Celebration" - The "Green Sky Trilogy"[0] by Zilpha Keatly Snyder. We held off on playing the "Below the Root" video game[1] but I'm hoping that as we get into winter weather and outside time becomes more scarce we can get to it. It's arguably the final book in the "trilogy".
"Redshirts"[2] by John Scalzi. We've been slowly making our way through Star Trek TOS in the last couple years so. That gave her enough cultural fluency with the tropes in the book to make it effective.
"To Say Nothing of the Dog"[3] by Connie Willis. My daughter adores Victorian England and comedy. This book also turned her on to Jerome K. Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)"[4] (which I'm still working thru on my own-- I do not particularly love Victorian England but it is a good book).
Besides the books I read to my daughter, I also read Martha Wells' "The Murderbot Diaries"[5] series myself. I'm vaguely interested in the television adaptation. I'd love to hear what somebody who has read the series thinks of the TV version.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Sky_Trilogy
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Sky_Trilogy
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshirts_(novel)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Say_Nothing_of_the_Dog
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Men_in_a_Boat
- You might enjoy the opening of the comic novel Three Men In A Boat, where the narrator reads a medical dictionary and finds he is suffering from every malady listed apart from- much to his annoyance- housemaid’s knee.
https://gutenberg.org/files/308/308-h/308-h.htm
Published 1889
- JK Jerome is the author that has made me laugh the loudest and most times.
Try the novel "Three Men in a Boat".
It's extremely funny.
I loved Candide, and will try the other one.
- Indeed. In the same vein, Jerome K. Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat" has made me laugh out loud more than a century after it was originally written.
That said, Shakespeare's humor, as an example, lands more flat with me. English idioms and grammar have changed quite a bit since the 16th century, and though I can intellectually approach his plays and recognize the humor, I rarely laugh out loud to it because there's additional mental load required just to understand what's been said. I suspect that may be true of "Who's on First" in another couple of hundred years, too. I'll report back in 2224 and let you know!
- One of my favourite lines is from Three men in a Boat: "George has a cousin, who is usually described in the charge-sheet as a medical student, so that he naturally has a somewhat family-physician way of putting things".
- "Best" is always too hard - here are a handful that I love.
Pride & Prejudice - Jane Austen
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susannah Clarke
The Crow Road - Iain Banks
Equal Rites - Terry Pratchett
Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome
A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
Black Holes & Time Warps - Kip Thorne
The Inventions of Daedalus - David E H Jones
The Cuckoo's Egg - Cliff Stoll
I hope one or two of those float your boat!
