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    To Say Nothing of the Dog
    To Say Nothing of the Dog
    To Say Nothing of the Dog
    Audiobook20 hours

    To Say Nothing of the Dog

    Written by Connie Willis

    Narrated by Steven Crossley

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Connie Willis' Hugo and Nebula Award-winning Doomsday Book uses time travel for a serious look at how people connect with each other. In this Hugo-winning companion to that novel, she offers a completely different kind of time travel adventure: a delightful romantic comedy that pays hilarious homage to Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat. When too many jumps back to 1940 leave 21st century Oxford history student Ned Henry exhausted, a relaxing trip to Victorian England seems the perfect solution. But complexities like recalcitrant rowboats, missing cats, and love at first sight make Ned's holiday anything but restful. To say nothing of the way hideous pieces of Victorian art can jeopardize the entire course of history. Delightfully aided by the perfect comedic timing of narrator Steven Crossley, To Say Nothing of the Dog shows once again why Connie Willis is one of the most unquestionably talented writers working today.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateApr 18, 2008
    ISBN9781436121231
    To Say Nothing of the Dog

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    Reviews for To Say Nothing of the Dog

    4/5

    2,369 ratings172 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A romp through 19th, 20th and 21st century Oxford and Coventry as time travelling historians attempt to confirm details in order for Coventry Cathedral to be rebuilt as it was before it was des destroyed in WWII. With respectful references to Jerome K Jerome,
    • 5/5
      An absolute delight, especially for time travel fans, and oxford lovers.
    • 5/5
      This book was so much fun. It's odd. I last read a children's book, which was very dark. Then this one, for grownups, which was nothing but fun. Until I'd read about this book I didn't realize I'd like this kind of time-travel story, but it turns out I did. I loved it.
    • 3/5
      many of the characters are clueless and irritating
    • 5/5
      Totally enjoyable, especially for time travel fans. Funny and with a touch of romance.
    • 5/5
      Entertaining, amusing, convoluted. The future, time travel, the Blitz, Jerome K Jerome, cats, chaos, hideous neo-Gothic church architecture, goldfish, mystery novels, romance entanglements and (of course) the dog. [To Say Nothing of the Dog] is very different to Willis's [Doomsday Book], which it follows in the series. To Say Nothing has farce and mad professors and goldfish collectors where Doomsday has plague and death and a lot of serious emotional stuff - but both are built on the basic premise of historians from the future travelling into the past and stuff Going Wrong while they are there. I liked Domesday Book a lot, but I did think it was a bit slow and repetitive at times. To Say Nothing can also be a bit repetitive, but it's a bit of a farce so this is much less annoying: you expect farces to have parts where people are going back and forth and round and round in circles over and over again. To Say Nothing was also slow at times, but again this worked because of the style of the book: it consciously mimics [Three Men in a Boat], where slowness is part of the charm because the whole point of the thing is the journey and not the destination. In short, the most significant flaws of Doomsday Book were not completely eradicated in this book, but that didn't actually matter. [To Say Nothing of the Dog] has some wonderful characters, including the irritating and spoiled upper-class Victorians, the put-upon servants and the confused historians. Some are such pure embodiments of literary tropes and stereotypes that they'd completely fail if this book had a serious tone, but because it's quite frivolous the characters all fit in the context. What's more, the characters never slip at all. The plot requires some concentration at times, and can also get quite silly, but accompanying the historians of the future as they chase around Victorian Oxfordshire looking for a hideous piece of ornamental cast-iron is a lot of fun.All in all, this is a great romp through history and literature. And I do like a character who has a proper appreciation for Hercule Poirot and Lord Peter Wimsey.
    • 3/5
      This should be read along with "Three Men in a Boat" and "Have Space Suit - Will Travel." I suppose that it may not matter whether one reads them in chronologic order of authorship - it depends upon the predilections of the reader - one must not probe or become didactic - one merely advises that these three should all be read in a bunch.The best part of the Willis book is toward the end, when two characters from Merrie Engand altercate in Middle English. This passage is a tour de force! Congratulations Connie Willis! It is hysterically funny, and so completely right.
    • 3/5
      The novel, as suggested by the subtitle (How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump at Last), has a plot that is hard to detect at times. It primarily involves time travel itself which is used primarily as a tool for historical research. Although millions were spent to develop time travel as a commercial venture, it turned out to have no profit potential. In this novel the natural laws of the "time continuum" prevent anything of significance from being brought from the past to the future, and also act to keep time travellers away from historically critical events, such as the Battle of Waterloo. One plot thread indicated by the subtitle involves the time travelers search for an artifact known as the "Bishop's bird stump."* However, little progress is made in the search, and the nature of the bird stump is never clearly understood. The scavenger hunt never really developed significant interest for this reader.To Say Nothing of the Dog is heavily based on Jerome K. Jerome's classic novel Three Men in a Boat (1889). In doing so Connie Willis uses the Victorian novel's sub-title as her title, mentions the novel in the dedication, and has one of the main characters, Ned Henry, who seems to know about as much about Victorian literature as he does about any history, often quote Jerome's novel. It led this reader to wonder why he has so much of the work memorized.The novel is enjoyable at times, but did not gain traction for me. Each chapter begins with a wonderful epigram from a wide variety of people from Lewis Carroll to Darryl Zanuck. I looked forward to these signposts as much or more than the story. In the end this was a good read, but I would hesitate to recommend it to anyone who was not already a fan of Connie Willis or is more of a dog-lover than I.
    • 5/5
      Highly amusing book! The beginning of it was every bit as confusing as I had been warned (I bumped it to a 4.5 star rating due to this*) but the rest of the book was a fun romp through time. Parts of it were obvious to me as an observer (until the characters in the story) but other parts of it were nicely masked my mystery-novel-style twists. I love the writing skill evident in this book, and will be reading more of Connie Willis' work for sure.*Note: I understand why the beginning was confusing, both within the story and from a perspective of the writing of it. But the confusion made it a bit less enjoyable at first compared to later on.
    • 4/5
      It took me awhile to get into To Say Nothing of the Dog, but once I did, I thorougly enjoyed it. It has everything a reader could want: humor, romance, mystery and time travel. It's entirely different from the only other novel I've read by this author, Doomsday Book , which makes me think that Connie Willis is a very clever and talented writer. The plot is fast-paced and multi-faceted. It's purposefully written in the same style as Three Men in a Boat, of which there are several references, and I would recommend reading it first as it will add to the pleasure of reading To Say Nothing of the Dog.
    • 4/5
      Well written, humorous, time travel story about trying to retrieve an object from Coventry Cathedral before it burned down in 1940 during WW II, during the German bombing. Good bits on Victorian customs, etc. In some ways like Three Men in a Boat, which is referred to. Worthwhile.
    • 3/5
      The interesting thing about this book is that I enjoyed it more and more as I continue reading it. It starts with an unreliable narrator at the beginning. The denseness of the action, dialogue, descriptions, world building made it slow to get into. But once the narrator's brain cleared so did my understanding of what was happening. And by then I was invested in the mystery and the characters.
    • 4/5
      To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis (Vol. 2 of the Oxford Time Travel Series) (4 stars)Although this may be classed as volume 2, you in no way need to read volume one in order to enjoy this book. Even though I have read vol. 1 (The Doomsday Book), the novels are very different in tone. Vol. 1 is about time travel to the time of the Black Death, a much more somber subject, and Vol 2 is time travel to the Victorian Era and a tongue-in-cheek parody of an earlier Victorian work entitled Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome. The characters are familiar in both volumes and the apparatus of time travel is the same in the two books, but they are both very different novels and enjoyable individually. Not quite what I was expecting after the Doomsday Book, but an enjoyable read in between heavier subjects. This one is much lighter in tone, uses a lot of humor and makes fun of social stereotypes of the era. The scientists are traveling back in time to change an aspect of history and save a cat from drowning because cats have become extinct in their future world. It’s not hard-hitting science fiction going into the details of time travel, but more of a lighter historical romance piece but still enjoyable in its own way. It shows the author can be versatile in her styles of writing.
    • 4/5
      The opposite feel from the Doomsday book. Light and full of whimsy. Mistaken assumptions. Verity is a fan of classic mysteries. Lots of references to Agatha Christie and Peter Wimsey.
    • 3/5
      I wish I knew why this didn't work for me. People have been telling me about this book for years.

      Things I love: time travel, twee, Three Men in a Boat.

      But, I felt like I didn't know the characters, didn't care if they fell in or out of love, and that the stakes were absurdly low. Page after page of Inconvenient Amnesia befuddling the bland pudding of a protagonist. There were some amusing lines, but JKJ has more, so it required a deliberate outburst of will and determination to finish this one before rereading Three Men in a Boat.
    • 4/5
      I think the best value for money I've had during the pandemic was re-reading Connie Willis's “To Say Nothing of the Dog”, one of her time travelling historian novels based on the premise of historians travelling to different eras to study history. It's a comic, SF, mystery historical novel with the most convoluted, challenging and at the same time great fun and beautifully flowing plot. Working out what's going on is a challenge to the most hardened nerd, involving as it does fish, cathedrals and jumble sales, to say nothing of the dog. You don't have to read J.K. Jerome's Three Men and a Dog first but it will be a lot funnier if you do. This might not be the right moment for the first of the series about the Oxford historians travelling in time though - Doomsday Book, a tale of two pandemics involving a worrying shortage of toilet paper and some misguided Brexit protesters claiming that immigrants and/or time travel caused the pandemic...Connie Willis is probably a real time traveller as this was written in the 90s. “Blackout” and “All Clear” are the two last in the series and as they depict life in Blitz London they can put our crisis into perspective.It was either this or half an hour a day murdering Norwegian by not being able to trill the ‘r’ sound like a native of Bodø…In hindsight maybe it’d have been half an hour of taking my mind off the world and I’d also have known such invaluable phrases as ‘why does that elk have a bicycle?’, ‘I am not afraid to die’ and yesterday’s timeless ’leave this place and never come back’ in Norwegian… SF = Speculative Fiction.
    • 3/5
      This is the follow-up book to the sci-fi time-travel book - The Doomsday Book. I thoroughly enjoyed the first book, but was initially less enthused by the successor.The Doomsday Book had a good balamnce of sci-fi, time-travel and a light tone which made for a fun read.The new book, To Say Nothing of the Dog, struggled to achieve the same balance. I found the humour less humouress, and the plot descended first into farce and then into silliness. Fortunately, after the first third of the book, the balance came together again. There is not doubt that the author is highly skilled. I think the silliness that put me off may have been an attempt to capture some of the frivolity of Three Men in a Boat, on which the first part of the book is closely linked. From that point on the book gets better and better. There are lots of interesting references to other books, both high literature and Agatha Christie; many references to historical incidents and repercussions; and many references to locations in England - all very pleasing to this reader. And enough time-travel conundrums to simulate the frequent references to the who-dunnits.
    • 4/5
      The blurb on this make you expect something hilarious and this wasn't that. but it had a certain charm, and was most certainly amusing in a Victorian drawing room farce kind of way. I admit that I am very fussy when it comes to playing with the laws of physics, so a book using time travel is probably not going to be right in my wheelhouse. but this manages to pull it off very neatly. I can suspend disbelief and allow the author to break one rule of physics, or introduce one inexplicable thing, but only so long as the remainder of the book all makes scientific logical sense. And while this does allow timetravel, it alos has rules about how it is used, that you can only go backwards, that you can;t take anything that didn;t exist at the time and that you can't intentionally change the nature of history. So you can't go back in time with the intent to assissinate Hitler (no matter how much you might like to). I like a world that runs to certain rules, so this all made the acceptance of timetravel seem far more normal. The openeing surmise has the story set in 2057, where Lady Schrapnell is buolding a copy of Coventry Cathedral, as it stood just before it was burnt down in the Blitz. She's building this in Oxford, of course. And as part of her researches she has sent historians all over the early 20th century to check various items, their location and to get details of what they looked like. The last item is the oddly named Bishop's Bird Stump, a ghastly piece of Victoriana that was seen by Lady Schrapnell's ancestor, when it changed her life. After quite some time rooting around in Coventry before and on the night of the Blitz, Ned gets severe time lag and gets sent to the Victorian era for a rest and to escape Lady Schrapnell. Only he also has a task to complete that he's not entirely paid attention to... And so the Victorian comedty of manners begins. The other thing to love about this is the sheer number of loterary references it manages to pack in. Lord Peter Wimsey & Hercule Poriot get name checked, as does Three men in a boat. You've got to love a Historian who can pinpoint his date by which Christie novel has just been published. >:-) It was noticable that in this book published in 1998 that there was a pandemic in the early 21st century, the author was just a few years out... I can think of far worse ways to spend time that hurtling around a Victorian summer, trying to save the world by making sure that certain people end up in the right place at the right time to not change the course of history. It might not have bene laugh out loud funny, but it certainly made me smile multiple times. And that's no bad thin.g
    • 4/5
      Ned Henry is exhausted from all the jumps in time he has made lately, trying to find the "bird Stump" for Lady Schrapnell and her restoration of the Coventry Cathedral. At time hilarious for the misadventures of trying to get along during the bombing of London and the society of Victorian England, the action is fast-paced, and the characters of Ned and Verity are people we care about. The perennial time travel question of whether history can be changed by actions or objects is key to the plot.
    • 4/5
      “That's the trouble with books. They're timeless.” — Connie Willis, “To Say Nothing of the Dog”How can you travel into the past without changing the present? That question lies somewhere in most time-travel novels, but few writers deal with it as directly as Connie Willis does in her 1998 novel “To Say Nothing of the Dog.” Another in her series of novels about historians of the future studying history by going back into the past, this screwball comedy of a story has as its main focus an attempt to correct missteps made by other historians that might affect the outcome of World War II.Seemingly incidental events can have big consequences, and so historians Ned Henry and Verity Kindle are sent back to 1880s England to return a cat and to see that the cat's owner, a girl named Tossie, marries the right man, a mysterious Mr. C. They know from a diary fragment that she is supposed to meet Mr. C on a certain date, but how can they bring them together when they don't know who Mr. C. is, especially when she is already engaged to marry another man?This all gets very confusing for anyone who is not Connie Willis, but she maintains the comedy and the banter at such a high level that readers shouldn't mind too much. Not as satisfying as her later comic novel “Crosstalk,” this is nevertheless an enjoyable romp through time, with stops in the Coventry cathedral during the 1940 bombing, a medieval dungeon and elsewhere along the way.The novel is filled with literary references to William Shakespeare, P.G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and other writers. Ned even sees the three men in a boat that inspired “Three Men in a Boat.”Willis also dips into metaphysics. Religion has been ruled nonessential by Ned and Verity's time — sort of how most governors and mayors regard it during the present virus — yet time itself becomes a mystical force that rules the universe. The "continuum wanted those things to happen," we are told.Willis makes the same mistake made by a number of authors writing about the future — George Orwell, for instance — by not setting her story far enough into the future. Our historians are from the year 2057, time travel was invented between 2013 and 2020 and cats became extinct in 2004. Apparently she never imagined people would still be reading her novel in 2020 and finding those dates laughable. That's the trouble with books. They're timeless.
    • 4/5
      Read for Bookriot Read Harder 2020 challenge #9, last book in a series.

      This was a cross between a mystery and a time travel story, with several romantic storylines. The best character development happens with the relationship between Cyril the dog and Princess Arjumand the cat which was too cute. I enjoyed the plot and the characters. The beginning of the book was a calming and relaxing romp through Victorian times, the end was a time traveling bonanza. Only four stars simply because the middle sagged, Victorian times got a bit too slow and the time travel a bit too confusing. However I’m glad I pushed on and made it to the last third which picked up in pace and clarity, ending with a satisfying clarity and still just enough left open to the imagination. Definitely not something I would have picked up on my own if it hadn’t been for the challenge, and I’m glad I found it.

      Strange that in trying to place a timeline, they reference a pandemic that occurred sometime just before 2020. Made the whole thing eerily real.
    • 3/5
      While this is not as good as the first one, it is also a parody of another book. But you already know that. I did a bit of research on that other book. One day I might even read it.
    • 4/5
      Rollicking good time! (reminder to self: write more when life settles down)
    • 5/5
      Willis writes a delightful time travel romance stand-alone complete with excellent historical detail, ethical dilemmas, and a mystery involving a missing artifact.
    • 4/5
      Madcap pacing and an intricately-woven plot mark this fantasy novel of time travel, a la Willis. This time a wealthy but eccentric heiress, determined to build a perfect replica of the Coventry Cathedral destroyed during WWII, has members of the time-traveling group dashing about before, during, and after the 1940 bombing raid, trying to locate "the bishop's bird stump", which turns out to be a remarkably ugly vase. Along the way, history is changed (or not) and the timeline corrects itself (or doesn't), and the whole thing is a great romp, but don't try to figure it out.
    • 5/5
      Hilarious, which was somewhat unexpected as I read this after Doomsday Book. A time travel 19th century farce kind of? Like if Oscar Wilde had a time machine and also occasionally visited WWII? Ish?
    • 5/5
      This book revisits a couple of the characters from Willis' Doomsday Book (which I also loved), although this one was a lot funnier and lighter. It takes place in the future in Oxford, when historians travel in time to study history (or, as in this book, to recover hideous Victorian art for the reconstruction of a bombed-out cathedral). Having made too many trips through time recently, Ned Henry is suffering from advanced time lag and is instructed to go back to Victorian England for some rest and relaxation. However, there is a slight chance that the space-time continuum has been damaged, and Ned won't be able to get any rest until he fixes it.

      This book was super fun and combined a bunch of genres in a thoroughly enjoyable way. Also, there are kittens. And a long-suffering bulldog. So, so good.
    • 5/5
      Loved it so much - a charming, funny wander through various mystery genres, Oscar Wilde and all the timey-wimey-ness. I will say it made a lot more sense after having read, and loved, The Doomsday Book first. I tried to read this on its own a while ago, and got lost and impatient. So read the books in order, please.
    • 4/5
      Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog is the second novel in her Oxford Time Travel series and follows historians Ned Henry and Verity Kindle in the Victorian era. Henry travels there after multiple trips to World War II searching for the fate of a sculpture to be recreated for Lady Schrapnell, a wealthy American neo-aristocrat wants to rebuilt Coventry Cathedral in Oxford, give him “time-lag” and require a rest to recuperate. He, along with Kindle, look for more clues to the fate of this statue while staying with Lady Schrapnell’s ancestor. The novel uses elements of science fiction, comedy, and classical detective fiction to tell an entertaining tale that will delight those with an interest in Victorian culture. Further, Willis’s excellent research fully recreates the time periods to which she sends her protagonists. After the first novel, Doomsday Book, this is a nice break from the more serious content, especially as the next story, Blackout/All Clear, returns to the more serious tone. Interestingly, being written in 1997 to follow a series that began with the short story “Fire Watch” in 1982, Willis somewhat dates herself when Henry accidentally transports to the recent past and thinks, “Before 2020, then, but after the Pandemic, and the railway schedule meant it was before the Underground had reached Oxford. And after the invention of time travel. Between 2013 and 2020” (pg. 380). Of course, that’s a risk all science fiction takes and it almost adds to some of the comedy in this novel, which takes its name from Jerome K. Jerome’s 1889 humorous account of a boat trip, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog).
    • 5/5
      I adore Connie Willis. Well, since I've never met her I guess what I really adore is her writing. However, I am quite sure that if I met her I would adore her. She is always witty but in this book she outdoes herself. This is book 2 in the Oxford Time Travel series, the first book being the fabulous Doomsday Book. In this book the time historians are shuttling between 1940 and 1888 trying pin down what happened to the Bishop's bird stump, a particularly awful example of Victorian art which was in the Coventry Cathedral on the night it was bombed. Lady Schrapnell was so moved by her great-great-grandmother's account of seeing it in the church in 1888 that Lady Schrapnell, who is immensely wealthy, decided to rebuild Coventry Cathedral in Oxford down to every detail, including the bird stump. Ned Henry has been combing jumble sales and digging through the rubble so much that he has become time-lagged. The supervisor decides that what he needs is a jaunt back to 1888 to rest and if he can somehow find out what about the bird stump so changed Lady Schrapnell's ancestor's life that would be a help. Ned, an Oxford student called Terence St. Trewes, and his tutor, Professor Peddick, along with Terence's bulldog Cyril end up taking a boat down the Thames. Terence is anxious to get to Muching's End because he met a young woman from there when she was searching for her lost cat. Ned vaguely remembers that he was instructed to go to Muching's End to meet his contact. And Professor Peddick just wants to go anywhere he can fish. These are not the original Three Men in a Boat from Jerome K. Jerome's book of that name but their adventures are equally amusing. I have not read Three Men in a Boat but I can tell that I shall have to now.