To Say Nothing of the Dog Review by Michael Lee

Despite having recently added a selection of top ten books, we haven't had the additional book related views to add to our movie reviews, so when I finished something that I thought that would be good for the site, I figured it was time to do one of my own.

I finished To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis over the weekend, spending most of Sunday completely engrossed by it, not even wanting to spend the time to eat or doing anything else at all. When a book demands that I continue reading it -- not to put it down for one second -- it's amazing stuff, and hasn't happened in a long time. Funny, romantic, and intelligent, it's perfectly suited for me, who grew up fascinated by the threads of history in James Burke's Connections series, and the mythical view of England portrayed on US Public Television. (It's not a real England that is in the book clearly...)

It's a not-so-shaggy dog (the main dog, Cyril, is a bulldog) story, tying a future time traveling society that thinks that the most important thing is to go back in time to reconstruct old churches, WW2, and Victorian England all together. This book is more literate than I deserve, but the plot and characters are such that I never felt left behind when I missed a reference. [I'd never before encountered Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, To Say Nothing of the Dog, which is where the title comes from.]

I don't read nearly enough to have any opinion on Hugo winners -- but I certainly can't argue with this 1999 Hugo winner. It's one of the best books I've read in a long time, with a quick pace -- I've read books with half the page count that have felt like they were ten times the length.

One of the things I like about the book was that it had simultaneously mystery elements, science fiction, Victoriana, comedy and romance. For example, one of the rules of time travel in this book is that people who make several "drops" end up near-drunk, with the tendency to confuse what people say and to fall in love at first sight. It's sort of like the Back to the Future, I suppose, with one of the main purposes of the plot being to make sure the right people get together, sometimes without knowing who the right people are!

From reading up on the book, this takes place in the same universe as her previous novel Doomsday Book, which I've been told is not the comedy that this one is, but is also supposed to be good.

Needless to say, I strongly recommend it -- either pick it up at your local bookstore or through amazon.com. The book showed up on various recommendation lists (including ones that pay attention to my other book purchases like Amazon), so I think all I can do is pass on the good word to other people as well.

Views Home New Video Picks: American Movie and the Incredible Hulk Space Cowboys Review: Geezers in Space. (08/21/2000) Godzilla 2000 Review: Men in rubber suits matter. (08/17/2000) Sir Alec Guinness Obituary: 1914-2000. (08/06/2000) Ultraviolet Review: Tales of the Undead. (08/02/2000)

To Say Nothing of the Dog

Five out of Five Beakers

Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Michael Lee stepped into the MISFITS Website and vanished .... He woke to find himself trapped on the Internet, facing pages that were not his own and driven by an unknown force to change the MISFITS Website for the better. His only guide on this journey is Professor Maxwell Misfittle, an observer from his own time, who appears in the form of a hologram that only Mike can see and hear. And so Mr. Lee finds himself leaping from site to site, striving to put right what once went wrong and hoping each time that his next leap will be the leap home. Michael previously wrote an obituary for Sir Alec Guiness.

I certainly can't argue with this 1999 Hugo winner.