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To Say Nothing of the Dog; or, How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump at Last by Connie Willis
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To Say Nothing of the Dog; or, How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump at…

by Connie Willis

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2,521671,035 (4.29)141

Member recommendations

  1. hiredman recommends Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
  2. Pagemistress recommends Sorcery and Cecelia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot by Patricia C. Wrede
  3. Pagemistress recommends Sorcery and Cecelia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot by Patricia C. Wrede
  4. myshelves recommends Three men in a boat by Jerome K. Jerome
  5. nessreader recommends Scholarly Magics by Caroline Stevermer, "College of Magics is a swashbuckling coming of age novel about a Ruritanian princess (who has a perfectly proper English friend, a demure witch with a (see more) passion for millinery) Jane, the English friend is the lead in the sequel, Scholar of Magics, which is a closer match for To Say Nothing.. Edwardiana, cream teas, and magic, in books told with a deft wit: that describes both To Say Nothing and Scholar of Magics."
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Showing 1-5 of 66 (next | show all)
Well, that was 500 pages of weird. Ned works for a sort of time agency that sends people to the past for...well, probably research, but that's never quite made clear. He's trying to find a sculpture-thing (the Macguffin of the book, the bishop's bird stump) and then ends up stuck unprepared in Victorian times to recuperate from "time-lag" brought on by too many jumps in too short a time.

This book is well-written, impeccably plotted, and intriguing enough that even though I didn't actually like it all that much, it kept me reading to the end in order to figure out what the heck was going on. I did enjoy how (and why) things got tied up at the end. However, this is not a book I'm planning to reread. ( )
bluesalamanders | Jul 5, 2009 |  
I quite enjoyed the first half and the setup of this one, but it lagged in the final third or so. Ned spends a lot of time just sitting around reviewing, yet again, the details of the situation. Could have been about 200 pages shorter. I enjoyed the literary references and the humour and I'm a sucker for Victorian settings, but the scifi & mystery elements were not really well done imo. ( )
littlegeek | Jun 3, 2009 |  
Another adventure of the time traveling historians that Willis invented in the "Doomsday Book", this time a very funny one that deservedly received the 1999 Hugo Award! The title is the subtitle of Jerome K. Jerome's classic novel "Three Men in a Boat" which is constantly referred to. The rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral in the exact shape it was in before it was destroyed by the Nazis takes a lot of guts from the scientists, and the final missing piece could be the so called "Bishop's bird stump" - but was it even there the day the Germans attacked? A really great read, funny, full of suspense, another winner by Connie Willis, one of my favorite SF authors. ( )
DieterBoehm | May 22, 2009 |  
This book is very clever, witty and amusing, but it was an extremely slow starter for me. I almost gave up, but I'm glad I didn't. ( )
bookworm814 | May 4, 2009 |  
I don't know what it is exactly that I don't like about this book, but I don't like it. Maybe it's because of the era they time-travelled to (I don't like historical fiction and know and care nothing about British historical sites), or maybe because it tries so hard to be "clever".

Anyway, I'm sure it's well written, it's just too, err, complicated? clever? convoluted? for me to enjoy - and it would appear that I'm in the minority in this, so... ( )
crazybatcow | Apr 30, 2009 |  
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Series (with order)
Canonical Title
Original publication date
People/Characters
Important places
Important events
Awards and honors
Epigraph
"...a harmless, necessary cat"--William Shakespeare
"God is in the details."--Gustave Flaubert
Dedication
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.
First words
There were five of us--Carruthers and the new recruit and myself, and Mr. Spivens and the verger.
Quotations
She sighed. "It's too bad. 'Placetne, magistra?' he said when he proposed, and then she said, 'Placet'. That's a fancy Oxford don way of saying yes. I had to look it up. I hate it when people use Latin and don't tell you what they mean.
It was actually more of a swoon than a faint. She slumped sedately to the flowered carpet, managing to avoid hitting any of the furniture--no small feat since the room contained a large round rosewood table, a small triangular table with a tintype album on it, a mahogany table with a bouquet of wax flowers under a glass dome on it, a horsehair sofa, a damask loveseat, a Windsor chair, a Morris chair, a Chesterfield chair, several ottomans, a writing desk, a bookcase, a knick-knack cabinet, a whatnot, a firescreen, a harp, an aspidistra, and an elephant's foot.
Last words
Disambiguation notice
Publisher's editors
Blurbers
Book description

Amazon.com (ISBN 0553575384, Mass Market Paperback)

To Say Nothing of the Dog is a science-fiction fantasy in the guise of an old-fashioned Victorian novel, complete with epigraphs, brief outlines, and a rather ugly boxer in three-quarters profile at the start of each chapter. Or is it a Victorian novel in the guise of a time-traveling tale, or a highly comic romp, or a great, allusive literary game, complete with spry references to Dorothy L. Sayers, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Conan Doyle? Its title is the subtitle of Jerome K. Jerome's singular, and hilarious, Three Men in a Boat. In one scene the hero, Ned Henry, and his friends come upon Jerome, two men, and the dog Montmorency in--you guessed it--a boat. Jerome will later immortalize Ned's fumbling. (Or, more accurately, Jerome will earlier immortalize Ned's fumbling, because Ned is from the 21st century and Jerome from the 19th.)

What Connie Willis soon makes clear is that genre can go to the dogs. To Say Nothing of the Dog is a fine, and fun, romance--an amused examination of conceptions and misconceptions about other eras, other people. When we first meet Ned, in 1940, he and five other time jumpers are searching bombed-out Coventry Cathedral for the bishop's bird stump, an object about which neither he nor the reader will be clear for hundreds of pages. All he knows is that if they don't find it, the powerful Lady Schrapnell will keep sending them back in time, again and again and again. Once he's been whisked through the rather quaint Net back to the Oxford future, Ned is in a state of super time-lag. (Willis is happily unconcerned with futuristic vraisemblance, though Ned makes some obligatory references to "vids," "interactives," and "headrigs.") The only way Ned can get the necessary two weeks' R and R is to perform one more drop and recuperate in the past, away from Lady Schrapnell. Once he returns something to someone (he's too exhausted to understand what or to whom) on June 7, 1888, he's free.

Willis is concerned, however, as is her confused character, with getting Victoriana right, and Ned makes a good amateur anthropologist--entering one crowded room, he realizes that "the reason Victorian society was so restricted and repressed was that it was impossible to move without knocking something over." Though he's still not sure what he's supposed to bring back, various of his confederates keep popping back to set him to rights. To Say Nothing of the Dog is a shaggy-dog tale complete with a preternaturally quiet, time-traveling cat, Princess Arjumand, who might well be the cause of some serious temporal incongruities--for even a mouser might change the course of European history. In the end, readers might well be more interested in Ned's romance with a fellow historian than in the bishop's bird stump, and who will not rejoice in their first Net kiss, which lasts 169 years!

(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:55 -0400)

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