"What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through." --Virginia Woolf
Wednesday, December 08, 2004
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
I read this because my brother (a big sci-fi reader) sent me the novel To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis for my birthday last summer. The Willis novel was charming and a good reminder that my students should not be misjudged for enjoying science fiction and fantasy, and was chock-full of intertextuality (imagine...sci-fi writers read too). The title comes from the late nineteenth century Jerome work, in which three men and a dog (Montmorency!) take a hapless, boating trip on the Thames. Not a book I'd use in class probably, simply because its lack of narrative cohesiveness is hard for beginners to get away with, but very funny. A sort of Basil Fawlty in a boat.
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Just dropped in through some linkage. Loved the JKJ book and its sequel. Read them for the same reason, too (CW's excellent novel). And noticed there was a large upswing of available editions of 3MIAB after Willis' novel got published. Good to see the old getting a chance with the new.
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