September 24, 2021 I’ve read seven more chapters of "Huckleberry Finn," and in that short space we’ve got two very dark episodes: the feuding clans that are rather quickly annihilating themselves, and a near-lynching of a man who has himself committed a cold-blooded murder of a drunk. All of this violence is told in a … Continue reading 22 chapters into Huckleberry Finn
September 23, 2021 I’ve taken years to read "The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn", because of its darn reputation. The back cover of my 1985 Penguin edition quotes Hemingway’s famous line, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn”. Further down we read that “Of all the contenders for the title … Continue reading Starting Huckleberry Finn
Having read Laura Ingalls Wilder's “Little House” books earlier this year, and now reading “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” for the first time, it seems to me that Mark Twain produced for boys’ childhood something similar to what Wilder did for girls. Both have produced an idealized but recognizable memory of childhood in a time … Continue reading Tom Sawyer
My son recently read a kids' edition of H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine," and our house has been busy with this story in various forms. I read the novel some 15 years ago and it remains a favorite. I've also seen both of the major adaptations, from 1960 and 2002, and my son and I … Continue reading The Time Machine
I almost skipped reading "Comanche Moon" because of some critical reviews – and it does have a lot of flaws, which I’ll get into. In the end I decided to read it because it brings back Famous Shoes, the Kickapoo tracker who was practically the best single thing about “Streets of Laredo.” And there is … Continue reading Comanche Moon
Larry McMurtry published “Streets of Laredo”, his sequel to “Lonesome Dove”, in summer 1993. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution then ran a piece by Michael Skube, who compared “Lonesome Dove” to “Don Quixote”: Living briefly off the luster of its predecessor, a sequel establishes its own grounds as art or it diminishes the work from which … Continue reading McMurtry and Cervantes
