I finished reading The Innocents Abroad, the first full-length book in my new project of reading all of Mark Twain in chronological order. There is no more genial traveling companion of the mind than Twain, as he cracks me up every couple of paragraphs with some new bold and frequently pompous statement regarding the sights of Gibralter, Paris, Rome, Venice, Athens, Constantinople, Jerusalem, and Alexandria, among many other stops. He saw a lot of pieces of the True Cross, and other saintly relics, which he never failed to point out as proof of the stories in the Bible, because there are so many of them. At times, his views of Arabs come across as racist, but hes just as prone to exagerrated generalizations about every other group, whether national, racial, or parochial, that he comes across. He was a product of his time, but even so, more open-minded than most. And his prose, shaped by the vernacular, just sings! This will be a fun project.
Posted on: Fri, 03 Oct 2014 20:53:15 +0000
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