Huck Finn's dilemma: send his friend Jim back to slavery as he has been taught he must do, or go against his church's teaching by helping Jim to escape, and then go to eternal hell as punishment I've started reading David Bentley Hart's "That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell and Universal Salvation." It is … Continue reading That All Shall Be Saved
My blog is new, so I've never picked out favorite books for a year, but here we go. My ten faves for 2021, fiction and nonfiction, out of the 66 books I read: 1. New Testament -- the recent translation by David Bentley Hart 2. Notre Dame de Paris Translated by Alban Krailsheimer 3. Lonesome … Continue reading Favorite books of 2021 (and 2020)
In my blog posts I've compared similar passages across different novels, and I've got several passages from "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" that I want to link to other novels: "Moby-Dick," "Huckleberry Finn," "Tom Sawyer," "The Lord of the Rings," "Matilda," and one nonfiction book, Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot." Compare this declaration by King … Continue reading Esmeralda, cosmologist
This has been my favorite of the "Birchbark House" series. Jacob asked me while I was in the middle of it to read it to him, so we read the last half together. The introduction of other tribes goes one step further in this book with the Metis people, who “are the sons and daughters … Continue reading Chickadee
During the first quarantine summer (2020), my family and I were binging heavily on the "Little House On the Prairie" television show and starting to read Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House" novels. My wife, who read all those novels as a child, suggested we look into a series of young adult novels told from the … Continue reading The Birchbark House
Of the many conversations between Huck and Jim on their floating raft, one of my favorites is their discussion of how the stars came to be. Sometimes we’d have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark—which was a … Continue reading Huck and Jim, cosmologists
I’ve been reading the annotations and introduction by Michael Patrick Hearn in his “Annotated Huckleberry Finn”. That edition is a tour de force, and entirely engrossing. You want context for Twain’s novel, you get it, in rich detail. Hearn is not a fan of the final section of the book, in which Tom Sawyer concocts … Continue reading Huck Finn’s Evasion
Finishing "Huckleberry Finn," it struck me that there's no romance in the story, not even a steady female character. So in this respect the novel is somewhat similar to “Moby-Dick”, its main historical contender for the “title” of Great American Novel. But Huck doesn't quite go as far as Moby in casting off the ladies. … Continue reading Huck and the ladies
September 27, 2021 I’ve finished “Huckleberry Finn,” and I want to go straight to the controversial ending, in which Tom Sawyer reappears. It’s painful to read of all that Jim is subjected to, all because Don Quixote – excuse me, Tom Sawyer – feels the need to stage a dramatic rescue of the kind that … Continue reading Finishing Huckleberry Finn
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
