Die Farben der Zeit oder ganz zu Schweigen von dem Hunde und wie wir des…

1st Review: The problem with laughing when reading this book is that you have to put it down until you have stopped laughing. And no one, in their right mind, would want to do that. Willis is one of the best authors I have ever read! Clever, funny, and marvelously brave, she dives headfirst into complex ideas and makes it work!

2nd Review: March is the month of rereads. And this was a delight. This time around, having polished my detective skills with extensive Agatha Christie reading (See my 2018 reading list), I caught much more of the details that Willis sprinkles generously but not obstructively in the novel that make the puzzle all fit together. Truly a masterful composition by Willis. Worth the read. And the reread. And the next reread. ( )

I could not get into this book. It might be a fine work but the humor did not work for me. ( )

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. ( )

I did not expect much from this book. A Victorian comedy of manners? Not my usual fare. But it promised time travel, so I had to check it out, and I was richly rewarded in more ways than I expected. This book is so many things, but above all, extremely funny. A welcome change after all the dark apocalyptic dystopias I read in recent years. I want more. ( )

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. ( )