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To Say Nothing of the Dog; or, How We Found…
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To Say Nothing of the Dog; or, How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump at… (1998)

by Connie Willis

Other authors: See the other authors section.

Series: Oxford Time Travel series (2)

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4,1951661,090 (4.2)1 / 468
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  1. 132
    Doomsday Book by Connie Willis (amberwitch, Othemts, Patangel)
    amberwitch: A much darker book set in the same universe. This time the timetravel is to the dark middle ages instead of the gay Victorian era
    Othemts: To Say Nothing of the Dog is a more light-hearted time travel adventure which is sort of a sequel to Doomsday Book. Both are excellent, enjoyable novels.
  2. 90
    Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome (Medellia, rakerman, kittycatpurr, wookiebender)
  3. 70
    Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers (sturlington)
    sturlington: Because of all the Peter and Harriet references.
  4. 83
    The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (simon_carr)
    simon_carr: Similar light hearted style and 'book travelling' rather than time travelling but chances are if you like one then you'll like the other.
  5. 40
    Time and Again by Jack Finney (Kichererbse)
  6. 30
    Sorcery and Cecelia, or, The Enchanted Chocolate Pot: being the correspondence of two Young Ladies of Quality regarding various Magical Scandals in London and the Country by Patricia C. Wrede (Pagemistress)
  7. 30
    The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (sturlington)
    sturlington: To Say Nothing of the Dog refers to The Moonstone numerous times. It does give away the mystery, so be warned.
  8. 20
    The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers (Kichererbse)
  9. 42
    Scholarly Magics (A College of Magics, A Scholar of Magics) by Caroline Stevermer (nessreader)
    nessreader: 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 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.… (more)
  10. 10
    Farthing by Jo Walton (sturlington)
    sturlington: Both mashups of classic British mysteries and science fiction.
  11. 54
    Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (hiredman)
  12. 10
    Job: A Comedy of Justice by Robert A. Heinlein (Kichererbse)
  13. 22
    Love among the chickens by P. G. Wodehouse (gaialover)
  14. 12
    What Ho, Automaton! by Chris Dolley (Keeline)
    Keeline: Also a light Victorian mystery/romance with a Wodehouse feel
  15. 01
    My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time by Liz Jensen (isabelx)
    isabelx: Both are very funny time travel stories.
  16. 02
    Corrupting Dr. Nice by John Kessel (nessreader)
    nessreader: Both have a flavour of screwball comedy romance and wilful anachronisms abound while the unromantic lovers sort themselves out. Corrupting Dr Nice reminded me a lot of Preston Sturges' film, The Lady Eve.
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English (162)  French (2)  Spanish (1)  All languages (165)
Showing 1-5 of 162 (next | show all)
Six-word nonreview: Donated it to the library unfinished.

Extended nonreview:

Two days ago I posted on another thread that I was a third of the way through To Say Nothing of the Dog and wondering why I didn't quit. It's not that it lacks charm, I said, but it's so inflated with excess and repetitive verbiage that it's like trying to make a meal out of popcorn. Halving the words might have doubled the worth.

I decided to put it aside and start something else, just to see if I had any urge to come back to it and find out what happened.

I didn't.

Today I dropped it into the library's donation box along with Doomsday Book. I hope they'll both wind up in the hands of a potential fan who'll love them for all they're worth and not be bothered by all the vacuous verbosity.

There'll be no more of this author for me.

(not rated)
  Meredy | May 9, 2013 |
This was my second time travel novel by Connie Willis, and I found it much more entertaining than the previous one I read, Doomsday Book, even though I found its Victorian setting much less compelling than the medieval, plague-filled one of the earlier book. However, this one was put together much better, with less that seemed extraneous, and I was impressed both by Willis's characterization and with the way she wove together various time periods.

The book works on various levels as Ned Henry is sent back to Victorian era Oxford to attempt to fix an "incongruity," essentially the transport of something from the past to the present (2057, in this case) (or vice versa) that doesn't belong there and that can alter the course of history, and a whole mess of complications ensue. The plot gives Willis the opportunity to satirize various aspects of Victorian (and contemporary) society, including class relationships, sexual hypocrisy, spiritualism, and jumble sales; set characters to arguing about what drives history, individual actions or impersonal events; discuss the Battle of Waterloo; illustrate the relationship of the bombing of Coventry Cathedral by the Nazis with British determination to keep their ability to decipher coded German military orders a secret; analyze several decades worth of British mystery novels; and observe various romances in progress. What pulls all of this together, and makes the book a page turner, are her wonderful characters (both two-footed and four-footed), her lively and often funny writing style, the meditations on the little things that change the course of history, and her pacing. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel.
4 vote rebeccanyc | May 4, 2013 |
To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998) by Connie Willis is the third work in Willis’ time-travel series, all following the exploits of the “historians,” i.e., University of Oxford history students from the future. Her first Oxford time-travel work was a short story entitled Fire Watch (1982), followed by the novels: Doomsday Book (1992), To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998), Blackout and All Clear (both 2010). All four of the novels won Hugo Awards, and all but To Say Nothing of the Dog also won Nebula Awards. I must say immediately that I have read all four of these time-travel novels and I liked all of them very much. To Say Nothing of the Dog is a very good yarn that focuses on two Oxford “historians” from 2057. Ned Henry travels back to the site of Coventry Cathedral (England) just prior to and after it was destroyed by Nazi bombs in 1940. Ned is researching, trying to get a look at, and to determine the current status (whereabouts) of a flower container from the cathedral called “The Bishop’s Bird Stump.” If located, it (or a facsimile) will be used in a newly built recreation of the old cathedral. Unfortunately, the bird stump is not found in the cathedral, requiring Ned to go further back in time attempting to find it. Verity Kindle, who is researching another time and place in Victorian England accidently brings something from 1888 back to 2057, which may cause potentially serious incongruities in the flow of time, i.e., history could change. It is feared that these incongruities might result in different outcomes for British and German troops during WWII. Ned and Verity eventually work together in Victorian England to try to resolve the time incongruities and to stabilize the course of history. Like Willis’ other time travel novels, the reader is immersed in other times and cultures, meets many interesting characters, and tours English locales. In addition, the reader enjoys many twists of plot and shares the characters’ frustrations, hardships, and dangers in addition to their joy and happiness. Willis also includes humor in this novel, and I must say that I could have done without most of it, although I found it mildly amusing at times. I also found the Victorian English society portrayed in this book to be irritatingly pompous and silly. However, I plowed through those lengthy chapters and was rewarded during the compelling last 25% of the book. I enjoyed the way Willis enmeshed the time incongruities and the search for the “Bishop’s Bird Stump.” Overall, I thought it was another very well-written and enjoyable time-travel book by Connie Willis. BTW: The title of this book comes from the subtitle of Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, To Say Nothing of the Dog (1889). ( )
  clark.hallman | Apr 18, 2013 |
I finished this book about five minutes ago. I've been practically unable to put it down since I picked it up yesterday morning (screw all your practical reasons for not reading like work, socializing, food... I mean, who really needs to sleep, anyway?).

Basic premise: In the year 2057, a domineering aristocrat has financed the reconstruction of Coventry Cathedral to its prior glory (it was decimated in a Nazi blitz in 1940). To make the cathedral historically accurate, she's shanghaied every historian in the UK to search out the artifacts. As historians, each is prepped in his or her scholarly field, then sent through time to observe history in the making. Unfortunately, the safeguards fail and a historian accidentally brings something back from the Victorian era, potentially altering the space-time continuum and putting the threads of reality dangerously close to paradox.

Enter Ned, a time-lapse sufferer, who, under Lady Shrapnell's insistence, has made far too many time jumps in too short a timeframe and come close to a nervous collapse. He disappears into the Victorian era to hide from the shrill matron and try to set right the fabric of time. On the way, he meets an affectionate bulldog, a bumbling Oxford don, a proprietary pussycat, and prevents a Classics major from meeting his One True Love. The historians try to fix time and find the lost artifact (the bishop's bird stump) before the universe implodes.

That, and there's a lot of adjustment to Spiritualism, Victorian manners, and jokes about Jeeves, Lord Peter Whimsey, discussion on the nature of a good mystery (Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayrs, Wilkie Collins, et. al), and a few church bazaars with the dreaded jumble sales.

The writing is phenomenal. I can't believe I hadn't read Connie Willis before now! This book had me laughing aloud and wishing there was more so that I wouldn't be done yet. I'm definitely reading some of her other stuff. I figured out the twists partway through, but that's mainly because I've read a lot of mysteries. It didn't hamper my enjoyment at all. In fact, I liked knowing more than the heroes (though, to be fair, I am not time-lagged and hallucinating. I am merely an insomniac). To say nothing of the cats (or the dog, who was quite lovable) and the time-traveling historians. TIME TRAVELING HISTORIANS.

So yeah. This is a great book. Go read it. ( )
  eldashwood | Apr 17, 2013 |
Great fun! No skimming here - didn't want to miss the delightful turns of phrase. ( )
  DebbieBspinner | Apr 12, 2013 |
Showing 1-5 of 162 (next | show all)
To Say Nothing of the Dog is charming. It’s funny and gentle and it has Victorian England and severely time lagged time travelers from the near future freaking out over Victorian England, it’s full of jumble sales and beautiful cathedrals and kittens. This is a complicated funny story about resolving a time paradox, and at the end when all is revealed everything fits together like oiled clockwork. But what makes it worth reading is that it is about history and time and the way they relate to each other. If it’s possible to have a huge effect on the past by doing some tiny thing, it stands to reason that we have a huge effect on the future every time we do anything.
added by Shortride | editTor.com, Jo Walton (Jun 24, 2010)
 
I have read several stories by Connie Willis which I have enjoyed. However, these have all been short stories or novellas. At longer lengths, based on the three Willis novels I've read, I'm afraid I subscribe to the minority opinion that her work is vastly overrated. While I'm sure To Say Nothing of the Dog will sell well and may even garner Willis another Hugo or Nebula, it is another Willis book which adds to my opinion that she should stick with short fiction and stay away from time travel.
added by Shortride | editSF Site, Steven H. Silver (Feb 15, 1998)
 
Gleeful fun with a serious edge, set forth in an almost impeccable English accent.
added by Shortride | editKirkus Reviews (Oct 15, 1997)
 

» Add other authors (4 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Connie Willisprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Crossley, StevenNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Dinyer, EricCover artistsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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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.
Plans, intentions, reasons. I could hear Professor Overforce now. "I knew it! This is nothing but an argument for a Grand Design!"

A Grand Design we couldn't see because we were part of it. A Grand Design we only got occasional, fleeting glimpses of. A Grand Design involving the entire course of history and all of time and space that, for some unfathomable reason, chose to work out its designs with cats and croquet mallets and penwipers, to say nothing of the dog. And a hideous piece of Victorian artwork. And us.

"History is character," Professor Peddick had said. And character had certainly played a part in the self-correction--Lizzie Bittner's devotion to her husband and the Colonel's refusal to wear a coat in rainy weather, Verity's fondness for cats and Princess Arjumand's fondness for fish and Hitler's temper and Mrs. Mering's gullibility. And my time-laggedness. If they were all part of the self-correction, what did that do to the notion of free will? Or was free will part of the plan as well?

One of the first symptoms of time-lag is a tendency to maudlin sentimentality, like an Irishman in his cups or a Victorian poet cold-sober.
It is a temporal universal that people never appreciate their own time, especially transportation.
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Wikipedia in English (1)

Book description
Time-travel researcher Ned Henry shuttles back and forth between the 21st century and the 1940s in order to correct an incongruity brought forward from the past.
Haiku summary

Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (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 Thu, 14 Feb 2013 13:49:45 -0500)

(see all 5 descriptions)

Ned Henry is sent back in time to the 19th century to obtain the original plans of Coventry Cathedral, destroyed by the Nazis in World War II. A rich American wants to rebuild it. Problems arise when Henry's lady friend saves a cat from drowning, an act that threatens to alter history. By the author of Doomsday Book.… (more)

» see all 3 descriptions

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