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 The Idle Thoughts of An Idle Fellow

The Idle Thoughts of An Idle Fellow

Jerome K. Jerome

5.0
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One or two friends to whom I showed these papers in MS. having observed that they were not half bad, and some of my relations having promised to buy the book if it ever came out, I feel I have no right to longer delay its issue. But for this, as one may say, public demand, I perhaps should not have ventured to offer these mere "idle thoughts" of mine as mental food for the English-speaking peoples of the earth. What readers ask nowadays in a book is that it should improve, instruct, and elevate. This book wouldn't elevate a cow. I cannot conscientiously recommend it for any useful purposes whatever. All I can suggest is that when you get tired of reading "the best hundred books," you may take this up for half an hour. It will be a change.

PREFACE

One or two friends to whom I showed these papers in MS. havingobserved that they were not half bad, and some of my relations havingpromised to buy the book if it ever came out, I feel I have no rightto longer delay its issue. But for this, as one may say, publicdemand, I perhaps should not have ventured to offer these mere "idlethoughts" of mine as mental food for the English-speaking peoples ofthe earth. What readers ask nowadays in a book is that it shouldimprove, instruct, and elevate. This book wouldn't elevate a cow. Icannot conscientiously recommend it for any useful purposes whatever.

All I can suggest is that when you get tired of reading "the besthundred books," you may take this up for half an hour. It will be achange.

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Other books by Jerome K. Jerome

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 Three Men in a Boat

Three Men in a Boat

Fantasy

5.0

Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), published in 1889, is a humorous account by Jerome K. Jerome of a boating holiday on the Thames between Kingston and Oxford. The book was initially intended to be a serious travel guide,with accounts of local history along the route, but the humorous elements took over to the point where the serious and somewhat sentimental passages seem a distraction to the comic novel. One of the most praised things about Three Men in a Boat is how undated it appears to modern readers — the jokes seem fresh and witty even today. The three men are based on Jerome himself (the narrator J.) and two real-life friends, George Wingrave (who went on to become a senior manager in Barclays Bank) and Carl Hentschel (the founder of a London printing business, called Harris in the book), with whom he often took boating trips. The dog, Montmorency, is entirely fictional but, "as Jerome admits, developed out of that area of inner consciousness which, in all Englishmen, contains an element of the dog."The trip is a typical boating holiday of the time in a Thames camping skiff.This was just after commercial boat traffic on the Upper Thames had died out, replaced by the 1880s craze for boating as a leisure activity. Because of the overwhelming success of Three Men in a Boat, Jerome later published a sequel, about a cycling tour in Germany, entitled Three Men on the Bummel. A similar book was published seven years before Jerome's work, entitled Three in Norway (by two of them) by J. A. Lees and W. J. Clutterbuck. It tells of three men on an expedition into the wild Jotunheimen in Norway.

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