Lennart Hyland
Muse
Finished it now. Quite long but overall I enjoyed it. Great writing, characters and the story is sort of intriguing. Its a described as a murder mystery but who did it is already mentioned in the prologue
What book is everyone reading at the moment? Part 2.
- Thread starter alex04
- Start date
Finished it now. Quite long but overall I enjoyed it. Great writing, characters and the story is sort of intriguing. Its a described as a murder mystery but who did it is already mentioned in the prologue
Finished it now. Quite long but overall I enjoyed it. Great writing, characters and the story is sort of intriguing. Its a described as a murder mystery but who did it is already mentioned in the prologue
Ah, I remember it being well-written and interesting, but completely forgot its plot. Thanks.
Yes, I’ll be avoiding that book too!
Having read so much “great literature”, I find a lot of it disturbing, and recently I searched for a less traumatic read.
Just finished, Weekends With The Sunshine Gardening Society (2023) by Sophie Green, a very nice novel about friendship and the joys of gardening.
That restored me a bit, so today I've started and read the first 70 pages of The Great Post Office Scandal (2021/2022) by Nick Wallis, that I've been wanting to read to learn more about the whole terrible scandal.
alfaniner
Penultimate Amazing
Titanic Crossing.
A young adult novel about a boy travelling on the Titanic, and all the events that ensue. Written two years before the James Cameron movie came out. The main character is an artist...
Well, the actual Titanic trip is only the last couple chapters, and the sinking itself takes up a minimal part of the story. Some of the familiar events and people are mentioned. But as an adventurous or compelling story it doesn't have much to recommend it.
A young adult novel about a boy travelling on the Titanic, and all the events that ensue. Written two years before the James Cameron movie came out. The main character is an artist...
Well, the actual Titanic trip is only the last couple chapters, and the sinking itself takes up a minimal part of the story. Some of the familiar events and people are mentioned. But as an adventurous or compelling story it doesn't have much to recommend it.
Lennart Hyland
Muse
The Marriage Portrait - Maggie O'Farrell
Continuing with some historical fiction that got a lot of praise.
In the mid 1500s Italy, Lucrezia de Medici at age of 15 was forced to marry the much older Duke of Ferrara. And this is Maggies take on what might really have happened to her.
Continuing with some historical fiction that got a lot of praise.
In the mid 1500s Italy, Lucrezia de Medici at age of 15 was forced to marry the much older Duke of Ferrara. And this is Maggies take on what might really have happened to her.
Armitage72
Philosopher
I just bought the first two books for "The Expanse". I've been meaning to get them for a while, since I enjoyed the TV series, we're almost certainly not going to get more seasons, and I'd like to know how it ends.
These things are doorstops; almost 600 pages each, and Wikipedia says every book is over 500 - 600 pages. With nine books and a 400+ page short story anthology, this series is practically going to have a shelf to itself.
These things are doorstops; almost 600 pages each, and Wikipedia says every book is over 500 - 600 pages. With nine books and a 400+ page short story anthology, this series is practically going to have a shelf to itself.
Spektator
Is that right?
East of Eden, by John Steinbeck
After a long series of reading, getting distracted, returning to the book, traveling, coming back to the book, and other affairs, I finally finished reading East of Eden. My reactions:
It’s a mixed bag for me. It has more intricate and elaborate language than the other Steinbecks I’ve read. It’s nearly Faulknerian in linguistic complexity, whereas The Grapes of Wrath reads more like a Hemingway novel. The style is interesting and usually involving, except for a few times when I suddenly wonder, “Why is this even in the book?” Some of the descriptions slide into digressions, which threw me off the track of the plot, but those were infrequent.
Stylistically, the novel is intriguing and provocative. The plot hinges on characters and that is again a mixed bag. Tolkien once mentioned that he “cordially disliked” allegory, and the book is thick with allegory. I don’t think this will spoil anything, but the plot—twice—depends on a retelling of the Cain-and-Abel story. One time too many, or a few too many, the symbolic significance of a character would override the individuality of him or her and dispel any realistic impression of them as personalities. It’s not quite as bad as the review of Waiting for Godot in which the critic complained, “This is a play in which nothing happens twice,” but having two generations of Trasks re-enacting the Cain and Abel scenario is distancing.
I really wish Steinbeck had given us a few more characters to like. The Hamilton and Trask families dominate the novel, but those two clans don’t produce admirable individuals, really. One, Samuel Hamilton, is named for and based on Steinbeck’s maternal grandfather, and he is likable, but not notably successful as a husband and father. Adam Trask (ah, Cain and Abel again!) is unfocused as a youth, uncertain as an adult, unlucky in love, and unfortunate in his sons. His wife Cathy is, shall we say, quite evil. Their sons Cal and Aron, just like the older generation’s Charles and Adam, re-enact the story of, yes, Cain and Abel. And so it goes.
The one character that is difficult not to like is the Chinese-American man of all work, Lee. At first speaking like a burlesque Chinese stereotype, he eventually reveals an educated and eloquent grasp of English. He has a tragic backstory (I suspect the writers of the AMC series Hell on Wheels may have cribbed from Lee’s story of his immigrant parents and the transcontinental railroad). He is benign and self-sacrificing to an extreme degree. He lends aid and support to Samuel Hamilton, and then later works for Adam Trask and essentially steps in to help raise (and name) Adam’s sons. In the end, Lee presides over a final act of redemption in the novel’s closing scene.
The point of the novel—the subject of the story—is the good and evil that are intermixed in differing proportions in every living person. It centers on the possibility of understanding and forgiving those who disappoint, reject, injure, or offend us. The possibility focuses on a Hebrew word, timshel, that does not mean what Steinbeck thought it meant (he used a nineteenth-century exegesis as his source), but no matter. Like the characters, the word is in the final analysis a symbol, and it does the job.
Final thoughts: East of Eden has a kind of verbal and philosophical density that required me to re-read a number of chapters before going on to the next, just to feel sure that I got it. It’s an ambitious novel, a very good one, but not, I would say, a great one. The allegory overwhelms it, and like analogies, allegory eventually breaks down from its own weight. It’s a long book, and by the end I had been exasperated by Charles and Adam, the elder Trask brothers, one driven by anger and resentment, one a vague sort of lost soul And then comes the next generation, with again two sons, Cal and Aron, one arrogant, one tentative, both irritating. On the Hamilton side, Samuel is a blarney-tongued, mechanically gifted but financially unsuccessful dreamer. Samuel's offspring sort of meander in and out of the story. One of my greatest regrets with them is that one, Tom, commits suicide after believing that he had accidentally murdered his own sister, Dessie—and then Tom is just gone. No one ever mentions him or remembers him again, not even his successful, selfish brother.
It's a pity, because Tom is an interesting character and one wishes that, in the world of the Salinas Valley from the late 1800s up until 1918, he would have at least left a footprint in the sands of time.
The novel bears reading, but be prepared for a story and cast that branch off into a great tangle. That lack of focus kept me from anchoring my interest in any single character, though again there are flat-out brilliant stretches of narrative and some absorbing observations and ideas.
After a long series of reading, getting distracted, returning to the book, traveling, coming back to the book, and other affairs, I finally finished reading East of Eden. My reactions:
It’s a mixed bag for me. It has more intricate and elaborate language than the other Steinbecks I’ve read. It’s nearly Faulknerian in linguistic complexity, whereas The Grapes of Wrath reads more like a Hemingway novel. The style is interesting and usually involving, except for a few times when I suddenly wonder, “Why is this even in the book?” Some of the descriptions slide into digressions, which threw me off the track of the plot, but those were infrequent.
Stylistically, the novel is intriguing and provocative. The plot hinges on characters and that is again a mixed bag. Tolkien once mentioned that he “cordially disliked” allegory, and the book is thick with allegory. I don’t think this will spoil anything, but the plot—twice—depends on a retelling of the Cain-and-Abel story. One time too many, or a few too many, the symbolic significance of a character would override the individuality of him or her and dispel any realistic impression of them as personalities. It’s not quite as bad as the review of Waiting for Godot in which the critic complained, “This is a play in which nothing happens twice,” but having two generations of Trasks re-enacting the Cain and Abel scenario is distancing.
I really wish Steinbeck had given us a few more characters to like. The Hamilton and Trask families dominate the novel, but those two clans don’t produce admirable individuals, really. One, Samuel Hamilton, is named for and based on Steinbeck’s maternal grandfather, and he is likable, but not notably successful as a husband and father. Adam Trask (ah, Cain and Abel again!) is unfocused as a youth, uncertain as an adult, unlucky in love, and unfortunate in his sons. His wife Cathy is, shall we say, quite evil. Their sons Cal and Aron, just like the older generation’s Charles and Adam, re-enact the story of, yes, Cain and Abel. And so it goes.
The one character that is difficult not to like is the Chinese-American man of all work, Lee. At first speaking like a burlesque Chinese stereotype, he eventually reveals an educated and eloquent grasp of English. He has a tragic backstory (I suspect the writers of the AMC series Hell on Wheels may have cribbed from Lee’s story of his immigrant parents and the transcontinental railroad). He is benign and self-sacrificing to an extreme degree. He lends aid and support to Samuel Hamilton, and then later works for Adam Trask and essentially steps in to help raise (and name) Adam’s sons. In the end, Lee presides over a final act of redemption in the novel’s closing scene.
The point of the novel—the subject of the story—is the good and evil that are intermixed in differing proportions in every living person. It centers on the possibility of understanding and forgiving those who disappoint, reject, injure, or offend us. The possibility focuses on a Hebrew word, timshel, that does not mean what Steinbeck thought it meant (he used a nineteenth-century exegesis as his source), but no matter. Like the characters, the word is in the final analysis a symbol, and it does the job.
Final thoughts: East of Eden has a kind of verbal and philosophical density that required me to re-read a number of chapters before going on to the next, just to feel sure that I got it. It’s an ambitious novel, a very good one, but not, I would say, a great one. The allegory overwhelms it, and like analogies, allegory eventually breaks down from its own weight. It’s a long book, and by the end I had been exasperated by Charles and Adam, the elder Trask brothers, one driven by anger and resentment, one a vague sort of lost soul And then comes the next generation, with again two sons, Cal and Aron, one arrogant, one tentative, both irritating. On the Hamilton side, Samuel is a blarney-tongued, mechanically gifted but financially unsuccessful dreamer. Samuel's offspring sort of meander in and out of the story. One of my greatest regrets with them is that one, Tom, commits suicide after believing that he had accidentally murdered his own sister, Dessie—and then Tom is just gone. No one ever mentions him or remembers him again, not even his successful, selfish brother.
It's a pity, because Tom is an interesting character and one wishes that, in the world of the Salinas Valley from the late 1800s up until 1918, he would have at least left a footprint in the sands of time.
The novel bears reading, but be prepared for a story and cast that branch off into a great tangle. That lack of focus kept me from anchoring my interest in any single character, though again there are flat-out brilliant stretches of narrative and some absorbing observations and ideas.
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
Let the Right One In
If Salem's Lot were set in a Swedish suburb in the 80s. I'd already watched the movie a couple of times. I'm fascinated by how much more story there is in the book, and how the movie managed to distill it down to a single through-line without losing any of the essential story in the process.
If Salem's Lot were set in a Swedish suburb in the 80s. I'd already watched the movie a couple of times. I'm fascinated by how much more story there is in the book, and how the movie managed to distill it down to a single through-line without losing any of the essential story in the process.
Lennart Hyland
Muse
Thanks for the review! I read it a couple of years ago and can only remember in it being great
I do remember being kinda bummed about the ending, expecting it to be grandiose and it didn't (at least not for me).alfaniner
Penultimate Amazing
Working on Patriot Games by Tom Clancy. And I do mean working. This is one of the most boring books I've ever read. There's an incident in the first chapter, then at least 150 pages of travel, and conversations about basically nothing. Five pages of a return home flight on the Concorde, where nothing happens. Three pages of assembling a doll house for Christmas. Oh, and he loves, loves, loves his pregnant wife and daughter. I can guess where that's going.
I've had the movie in my watchlist for sometime so I'm determined to slog through the rest of this before I put it on. Hopefully it will be faster-moving. I'm all for procedural movies and books, but like I said, nothing happens here. Only about halfway through now. I hope the rest is worth it.
I've had the movie in my watchlist for sometime so I'm determined to slog through the rest of this before I put it on. Hopefully it will be faster-moving. I'm all for procedural movies and books, but like I said, nothing happens here. Only about halfway through now. I hope the rest is worth it.
SpitfireIX
Philosopher
Been ages since I read it, but I remember I enjoyed it quite a bit, and reread it at least once. And the movie has next to nothing to do with the novel, so I absolutely hated it. And that's not just my opinion; it was also Clancy's. In fact, he hated it so much that it soured him on selling the movie rights to his books for a long time. And as much as I love Harrison Ford, I think he was really miscast as Jack Ryan, after Alec Baldwin pulled out.
Damn, alfaniner, that might just be three books in a row that I last read at least 35 years ago that you've gotten me to reread.
(More on the first two when I have more time to post.)
Damn, alfaniner, that might just be three books in a row that I last read at least 35 years ago that you've gotten me to reread.
(More on the first two when I have more time to post.)alfaniner
Penultimate Amazing
Been ages since I read it, but I remember I enjoyed it quite a bit, and reread it at least once. And the movie has next to nothing to do with the novel, so I absolutely hated it. And that's not just my opinion; it was also Clancy's. In fact, he hated it so much that it soured him on selling the movie rights to his books for a long time. And as much as I love Harrison Ford, I think he was really miscast as Jack Ryan, after Alec Baldwin pulled out.
Damn, alfaniner, that might just be three books in a row that I last read at least 35 years ago that you've gotten me to reread.
I've been pretty lucky with the Little Free Library kiosks around the neighborhood. I was going to start The Call of the Wild which I picked up at the same time (I do contribute books too, btw). But, as I started it I noticed that it said "Updated and abridged". Even though there were some very nice drawings that were included, I thought the size and the size of the type made me think it was changed to appeal more to young adults or kids. I decided to wait and look for the original version.
If you like Patriot Games, great! We'll see if my opinion changes by the last half of the book.
Spektator
Is that right?
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876); The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884); Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894); Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896), all by Mark Twain
Spoilers are not marked. I doubt that I could spoil anything, anyway.
It took me a month or so to read East of Eden. Took me just a couple of weeks to read these four, plus Pudd'nhead Wilson, but then I taught two of them in American Lit and had never read the other two at all until recently. Let’s take a look at Twain, then.
Tom Sawyer was Twain’s first solo novel, though not his first book and far from is first fiction. It is set in the fictional St. Petersburg, Missouri, around the year 1845 or a little later. Narrated in omniscient third-person style by Twain, this novel is based on Twain’s boyhood recollections from Hannibal, Missouri, and is close to a ragbag of random anecdotes. To be sure, it has a sort of plot, showcasing the escapades of the widely-read but narrowly-experienced Tom and his friend the semi-illiterate Huckleberry Finn. It finds a kind of arc in the tale of a murder (witnessed by the two boys in a cemetery, where they have gone in quest of spunk-water and where a doctor and pair of grave-robbers have coincidentally come in quest of a cadaver). Tom and Huck know who the true killer is, and when the harmless town drunk is on the verge of being falsely convicted, they reveal the truth and Tom makes a deadly enemy of the murderer Injun Joe (the book was written somewhat before political correctness). There’s a youthful crush that Tom develops for Becky Thatcher, a section of being lost in a cave, and a finale in which Tom and Huck share in a treasure trove. In addition to these, there are the fence-painting scam, the Bible-school scam, the funeral scam, the . . .. You get the idea.
So how does it hold up? Twain wrote it not exactly as a boy’s book, but as a nostalgic book for those who once were boys. This time around I noticed how terminally irritating Tom is, a smart-assed, narcissistic kid who cheerfully disregards not only his own safety and comfort but also that of his best friends. Loose ends abound and are never woven into the fabric of the tale. Moments are funny, but it’s really hard now for me to get invested in Tom, and so the book seems to fall flat. Maybe it’s just me.
Huckleberry Finn is a more mature book and in it Twain shows more confidence as a writer. Crucially, Twain decided to allow Huck to tell his own story, in first person. True, he is barely literate in the earlier book, but he’s had a year of schooling, and he sweats out the narrative, told in his back-country Missouri dialect. Though it is still episodic, this novel has more structure than Tom Sawyer in that it falls into the picaresque mode, the thread on which almost all the incidents are strung being the Mississippi River. Clever lines still make me laugh, but by this point in his career, Mark Twain’s world view had soured, and the humor had become more cynical.
Huck takes up his tale where the earlier book end, explaining that Mr. Twain had made that book, and he told the truth—mainly. As a narrator and character, Huck is much more developed and interesting than Tom. The boys were about twelve or thirteen in their first appearance, so here Huck is fourteen, or “along in there” as he puts it. Having been adopted by the Widow Douglas, who sets out to “sivilize him,” Huck is jolted out of the everyday world of St. Petersburg (the fictional equivalent of Hannibal) when his wandering, abusive, alcoholic father, Pap, shows up after a long absence and drags him away, aiming to get Huck’s share of the treasure the boys found. Huck escapes by faking his own death, and in hiding out from a search party he meets the runaway slave Jim (who appeared in the first book, seeming there to be about the same age as Huck, but here a grown man with a wife and children). They flee downriver on a log raft, and from there on, their friendship grows.
Huck, to his admitted surprise, slowly discovers that the slaves among whom he has lived his whole life are no different in their emotions than whites. Jim has run away because the slaveowner is planning to sell him, and maybe he’ll never see his wife and children again. The more time Huck spends with Jim, the more their friendship deepens. At a crucial moment, Huck makes the decision not to turn Jim in, though he honestly believes that will condemn him to hell.
The two have run-ins with drifting con artists, with feuding Southern families, and with another murder that almost results in a lynching until the murderer turns on the crowd and shames them into dispersing. These issues are taken seriously, unlike similar occurrences in the first book.
Sadly, Twain didn’t really plan out the course of the story, and at a tense moment when Jim has been captured far down the river from his home, Tom Sawyer coincidentally and randomly shows up to hog center stage again. With Tom’s wild plans running the show, Jim loses almost all the humanity that Twain revealed when Huck was telling the story. In the end, the Tom ex machina reveals that Jim’s former owner has died and left him free, so almost everyone’s problems are over. This is a much better novel than Tom Sawyer. It is four-fifths a great novel, with a disappointing conclusion.
Twain, needing money, wrote parts of several more books involving Huck and Tom, and he actually published two of them. Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective are short, hardly more than novellas. I’d never read them before, so they were new to me. Both are narrated by Huck. Alas, they are not impressive.
The former is, or sets out to be, a parody of travel-adventure novels like Around the World in Eighty Days. Tom and Huck, back hack home in St. Petersburg again, go to watch a balloon ascension, accompanied by Jim, who is no longer a slave but whose affect has relapsed into minstrel-show territory. The balloon is actually a dirigible, created by a mad inventor. Now, the era of the book is approximately 1850, so this is kinda-sorta science fiction. I mean, the balloon’s power plant is a technobabble revolutionary engine that never needs refueling, and the craft is sturdy enough that it can pack rations for three months, enough to take it clean around the world.
Anyway, while our heroes are touring the airship’s cabin, the crazed inventor suddenly casts off the lines, the dirigible rises, and Huck, Tom, and Jim are trapped aboard it. Seems the guy has been whipped to fury by the doubts of the hoi polloi and by gar, HE will show them! He’ll travel around the world in a month, a MERE MONTH, and then when he’s proved himself and his invention, he’ll crash the craft and commit suicide, and THEN they’ll be sorry! Bwah-ha-ha! As the terrified Tom, Huck, and Jim beg him just to set them down any old where, the insane inventor decides to throw them overboard from an altitude of two miles, but of course he falls to his own death.
No worries. Tom dopes out how to fly the dirigible, teaches the skill to Huck and Jim in no time at all, hardly, and then at his insistence they fly east. Tom intends to take the aircraft to England, land, and then become world-famous and rich before returning home to bask in the adulation of the crowd.
For virtually the entire piece, the material consists completely of Tom telling the other two about some scientific or geographical fact (e.g. in real life states are not different colors as they are on the map) and then Huck and Jim argue with him. Very repetitive and, frankly, not funny or even mildly interesting. Eventually the three cross the Atlantic (it takes about a week or ten days week from Missouri to the far side) and then they strike not England but North Africa, and most of the rest of the book follows them across the Sahara, which is infested by whole circusfuls of wild lions and tigers. Not much happens, and the story abruptly ends in the Middle East when Tom breaks his corncob pipe. He sends Huck and Jim back to Missouri to fetch him a new one, they go, and in just three days this time, they return with the word that Aunt Polly wants Tom to come home right that minute!
He does. End of novel.
Tom Sawyer, Detective takes place at the same time asAbroad. An alternate-universe story, I suppose. Anyway, Tom’s Uncle Silas, down in Arkansas, is also down in the mouth, and remembering how Tom and Huck kept life lively and amusing in Huckleberry Finn Uncle Silas's wife Aunt Sally asks Tom's Aunt Polly to send the boys downriver to cheer the old man up. On the steamboat they meet a jewel thief who just happens to be the twin brother of the self-same hired hand who has been driving Uncle Silas nuts and plunging him into depression. The thief is being hounded by his former partners, whom he double-crossed, and he’s scared that they’re plotting to kill him.
Before the steamboat gets to Uncle Silas’s digs, the jewel thief slips off the boat in the dead of night. The two bad guys light out after him to retrieve a couple of big old diamonds he stole from them. Huck and Tom trail the bad guys. . . and somebody gets killed in the night, and Uncle Silas is so rattled that he confesses to the murder, but the boys know better—
Again, Twain hastily wraps up the plot in the last chapter, in which Tom solves the murder (he doesn’t deduce anything at all, he has learned all he needs to know from the thief). Everybody goes home happy, and Huck and Tom get a reward.
The novellas are so slight that they scarcely merit seeking out. The best one can say of them is that they are mostly harmless, and the worst is that Twain was writing fast and carelessly and exploited the popularity of his first two Tom and Huck novel for a quick dollar or two.
Ranking them, I’d say Huckleberry Finn is by far the best, Tom Sawyer a fairly distant second, and the other two far, far behind. Detective does not drag Jim in just to humiliate him and so is a slight cut above Abroad but that’s not saying much.
tl/dr: Mark Twain wrote four books about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, but only two are worth reading.
Spoilers are not marked. I doubt that I could spoil anything, anyway.
It took me a month or so to read East of Eden. Took me just a couple of weeks to read these four, plus Pudd'nhead Wilson, but then I taught two of them in American Lit and had never read the other two at all until recently. Let’s take a look at Twain, then.
Tom Sawyer was Twain’s first solo novel, though not his first book and far from is first fiction. It is set in the fictional St. Petersburg, Missouri, around the year 1845 or a little later. Narrated in omniscient third-person style by Twain, this novel is based on Twain’s boyhood recollections from Hannibal, Missouri, and is close to a ragbag of random anecdotes. To be sure, it has a sort of plot, showcasing the escapades of the widely-read but narrowly-experienced Tom and his friend the semi-illiterate Huckleberry Finn. It finds a kind of arc in the tale of a murder (witnessed by the two boys in a cemetery, where they have gone in quest of spunk-water and where a doctor and pair of grave-robbers have coincidentally come in quest of a cadaver). Tom and Huck know who the true killer is, and when the harmless town drunk is on the verge of being falsely convicted, they reveal the truth and Tom makes a deadly enemy of the murderer Injun Joe (the book was written somewhat before political correctness). There’s a youthful crush that Tom develops for Becky Thatcher, a section of being lost in a cave, and a finale in which Tom and Huck share in a treasure trove. In addition to these, there are the fence-painting scam, the Bible-school scam, the funeral scam, the . . .. You get the idea.
So how does it hold up? Twain wrote it not exactly as a boy’s book, but as a nostalgic book for those who once were boys. This time around I noticed how terminally irritating Tom is, a smart-assed, narcissistic kid who cheerfully disregards not only his own safety and comfort but also that of his best friends. Loose ends abound and are never woven into the fabric of the tale. Moments are funny, but it’s really hard now for me to get invested in Tom, and so the book seems to fall flat. Maybe it’s just me.
Huckleberry Finn is a more mature book and in it Twain shows more confidence as a writer. Crucially, Twain decided to allow Huck to tell his own story, in first person. True, he is barely literate in the earlier book, but he’s had a year of schooling, and he sweats out the narrative, told in his back-country Missouri dialect. Though it is still episodic, this novel has more structure than Tom Sawyer in that it falls into the picaresque mode, the thread on which almost all the incidents are strung being the Mississippi River. Clever lines still make me laugh, but by this point in his career, Mark Twain’s world view had soured, and the humor had become more cynical.
Huck takes up his tale where the earlier book end, explaining that Mr. Twain had made that book, and he told the truth—mainly. As a narrator and character, Huck is much more developed and interesting than Tom. The boys were about twelve or thirteen in their first appearance, so here Huck is fourteen, or “along in there” as he puts it. Having been adopted by the Widow Douglas, who sets out to “sivilize him,” Huck is jolted out of the everyday world of St. Petersburg (the fictional equivalent of Hannibal) when his wandering, abusive, alcoholic father, Pap, shows up after a long absence and drags him away, aiming to get Huck’s share of the treasure the boys found. Huck escapes by faking his own death, and in hiding out from a search party he meets the runaway slave Jim (who appeared in the first book, seeming there to be about the same age as Huck, but here a grown man with a wife and children). They flee downriver on a log raft, and from there on, their friendship grows.
Huck, to his admitted surprise, slowly discovers that the slaves among whom he has lived his whole life are no different in their emotions than whites. Jim has run away because the slaveowner is planning to sell him, and maybe he’ll never see his wife and children again. The more time Huck spends with Jim, the more their friendship deepens. At a crucial moment, Huck makes the decision not to turn Jim in, though he honestly believes that will condemn him to hell.
The two have run-ins with drifting con artists, with feuding Southern families, and with another murder that almost results in a lynching until the murderer turns on the crowd and shames them into dispersing. These issues are taken seriously, unlike similar occurrences in the first book.
Sadly, Twain didn’t really plan out the course of the story, and at a tense moment when Jim has been captured far down the river from his home, Tom Sawyer coincidentally and randomly shows up to hog center stage again. With Tom’s wild plans running the show, Jim loses almost all the humanity that Twain revealed when Huck was telling the story. In the end, the Tom ex machina reveals that Jim’s former owner has died and left him free, so almost everyone’s problems are over. This is a much better novel than Tom Sawyer. It is four-fifths a great novel, with a disappointing conclusion.
Twain, needing money, wrote parts of several more books involving Huck and Tom, and he actually published two of them. Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective are short, hardly more than novellas. I’d never read them before, so they were new to me. Both are narrated by Huck. Alas, they are not impressive.
The former is, or sets out to be, a parody of travel-adventure novels like Around the World in Eighty Days. Tom and Huck, back hack home in St. Petersburg again, go to watch a balloon ascension, accompanied by Jim, who is no longer a slave but whose affect has relapsed into minstrel-show territory. The balloon is actually a dirigible, created by a mad inventor. Now, the era of the book is approximately 1850, so this is kinda-sorta science fiction. I mean, the balloon’s power plant is a technobabble revolutionary engine that never needs refueling, and the craft is sturdy enough that it can pack rations for three months, enough to take it clean around the world.
Anyway, while our heroes are touring the airship’s cabin, the crazed inventor suddenly casts off the lines, the dirigible rises, and Huck, Tom, and Jim are trapped aboard it. Seems the guy has been whipped to fury by the doubts of the hoi polloi and by gar, HE will show them! He’ll travel around the world in a month, a MERE MONTH, and then when he’s proved himself and his invention, he’ll crash the craft and commit suicide, and THEN they’ll be sorry! Bwah-ha-ha! As the terrified Tom, Huck, and Jim beg him just to set them down any old where, the insane inventor decides to throw them overboard from an altitude of two miles, but of course he falls to his own death.
No worries. Tom dopes out how to fly the dirigible, teaches the skill to Huck and Jim in no time at all, hardly, and then at his insistence they fly east. Tom intends to take the aircraft to England, land, and then become world-famous and rich before returning home to bask in the adulation of the crowd.
For virtually the entire piece, the material consists completely of Tom telling the other two about some scientific or geographical fact (e.g. in real life states are not different colors as they are on the map) and then Huck and Jim argue with him. Very repetitive and, frankly, not funny or even mildly interesting. Eventually the three cross the Atlantic (it takes about a week or ten days week from Missouri to the far side) and then they strike not England but North Africa, and most of the rest of the book follows them across the Sahara, which is infested by whole circusfuls of wild lions and tigers. Not much happens, and the story abruptly ends in the Middle East when Tom breaks his corncob pipe. He sends Huck and Jim back to Missouri to fetch him a new one, they go, and in just three days this time, they return with the word that Aunt Polly wants Tom to come home right that minute!
He does. End of novel.
Tom Sawyer, Detective takes place at the same time asAbroad. An alternate-universe story, I suppose. Anyway, Tom’s Uncle Silas, down in Arkansas, is also down in the mouth, and remembering how Tom and Huck kept life lively and amusing in Huckleberry Finn Uncle Silas's wife Aunt Sally asks Tom's Aunt Polly to send the boys downriver to cheer the old man up. On the steamboat they meet a jewel thief who just happens to be the twin brother of the self-same hired hand who has been driving Uncle Silas nuts and plunging him into depression. The thief is being hounded by his former partners, whom he double-crossed, and he’s scared that they’re plotting to kill him.
Before the steamboat gets to Uncle Silas’s digs, the jewel thief slips off the boat in the dead of night. The two bad guys light out after him to retrieve a couple of big old diamonds he stole from them. Huck and Tom trail the bad guys. . . and somebody gets killed in the night, and Uncle Silas is so rattled that he confesses to the murder, but the boys know better—
Again, Twain hastily wraps up the plot in the last chapter, in which Tom solves the murder (he doesn’t deduce anything at all, he has learned all he needs to know from the thief). Everybody goes home happy, and Huck and Tom get a reward.
The novellas are so slight that they scarcely merit seeking out. The best one can say of them is that they are mostly harmless, and the worst is that Twain was writing fast and carelessly and exploited the popularity of his first two Tom and Huck novel for a quick dollar or two.
Ranking them, I’d say Huckleberry Finn is by far the best, Tom Sawyer a fairly distant second, and the other two far, far behind. Detective does not drag Jim in just to humiliate him and so is a slight cut above Abroad but that’s not saying much.
tl/dr: Mark Twain wrote four books about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, but only two are worth reading.
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The Thursday Murder Club(series) by Richard Osman
Binging through all 4 books, and thoroughly enjoying them.
A gorup of residents in a retirement community form a club to go over old unsolved police cases and try to solve them, then things get a bit close to home.
There are plenty of 'suspension of disbelief' moments, but if you allow yourself to be swept along with the narrative, these are very enjoyable. Osman has quite a deft hand mixing comedy, drama and genuinely moving moments, particularly dealing with ageing, dementia and so on. There are moments that remind me of Pratchett, and that is high praise indeed.
Binging through all 4 books, and thoroughly enjoying them.
A gorup of residents in a retirement community form a club to go over old unsolved police cases and try to solve them, then things get a bit close to home.
There are plenty of 'suspension of disbelief' moments, but if you allow yourself to be swept along with the narrative, these are very enjoyable. Osman has quite a deft hand mixing comedy, drama and genuinely moving moments, particularly dealing with ageing, dementia and so on. There are moments that remind me of Pratchett, and that is high praise indeed.
alfaniner
Penultimate Amazing
Gahhh. Slogged through to the end of Patriot Games. Only two or three interesting incidents in the whole thing. And it was loaded with NPCs, dozens and dozens of characters with generic names that are indistinguishable from one another. The rest was talking about nothing in particular and some historical background that I didn't care about.
This one also had one of those eyeworms that authors sometimes have, and this one was... coffee. Every ten pages or so someone makes or buys or drinks coffee (or tea). It's like 50s movies where everyone was constantly smoking cigarettes, but at least that lent some visual business to those scenes. Even at the tense boat chase near the end (spoiler? I don't care, and it doesn't matter anyway), someone goes down to the galley to... make coffee. I actually rolled my eyes at this point. But they never get to it during the action, until afterwards, when they drink the coffee.
I still plan to see the movie since it's in my Watchlist. I expect it to be a lot tighter than the book, or it would be a 10-hour movie.
This one also had one of those eyeworms that authors sometimes have, and this one was... coffee. Every ten pages or so someone makes or buys or drinks coffee (or tea). It's like 50s movies where everyone was constantly smoking cigarettes, but at least that lent some visual business to those scenes. Even at the tense boat chase near the end (spoiler? I don't care, and it doesn't matter anyway), someone goes down to the galley to... make coffee. I actually rolled my eyes at this point. But they never get to it during the action, until afterwards, when they drink the coffee.
I still plan to see the movie since it's in my Watchlist. I expect it to be a lot tighter than the book, or it would be a 10-hour movie.
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alfaniner
Penultimate Amazing
Holy cow... Just started The Partner by John Grisham and I have to wonder if it's a pseudonym for Tom Clancy. I wouldn't have noticed it if not having been primed for it by that previous book, but... the coffee!!! Six times in the first hundred pages, people get coffee. I guess it must be a "writer's" thing, they're always drinking coffee when they're writing.
I've sometimes wondered why in some sci-fi survival situations the characters are desperate for coffee. I mean, it doesn't provide any nutritional value -- that energy spent searching for it would be better put to looking for, oh, I don't know, real food? I make an exception for The Expanse because that was a part of the character.
It's a stupid thing to be irritated by in a book, but twice in a row, by different authors? Maybe I'll just go back to sci-fi instead of lawyer or government spook stories.
I've sometimes wondered why in some sci-fi survival situations the characters are desperate for coffee. I mean, it doesn't provide any nutritional value -- that energy spent searching for it would be better put to looking for, oh, I don't know, real food? I make an exception for The Expanse because that was a part of the character.
It's a stupid thing to be irritated by in a book, but twice in a row, by different authors? Maybe I'll just go back to sci-fi instead of lawyer or government spook stories.
alfaniner
Penultimate Amazing
In the next 30 or so pages, he had four more scenes (all different) of people getting, drinking, making, or sipping coffee. I **** you not. It's enough to drive a reader insane.
(eta) -- Oh, sorry. I just remembered there's a "Pet Peeves in Literature" thread. But I'm not going to repost there. Maybe a summary once I finish the book. If I do.
(eta) -- Oh, sorry. I just remembered there's a "Pet Peeves in Literature" thread. But I'm not going to repost there. Maybe a summary once I finish the book. If I do.
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Safe-Keeper
My avatar is not a Drumpf hat
Never Let Me Go. Bit of a tough read because of , so it's a bit of a trudge. Will have to get back into it, though.
If anyone wants a light and funny read, I recommend Will Leave the Galaxy for Good. It has the feel of one of those 80s or 90s comedy movies that were just lighthearted and 'innocent'. I read it without knowing it was the third book in a series, though, so I guess start with the first? I don't know, it's good either way.
If anyone wants a light and funny read, I recommend Will Leave the Galaxy for Good. It has the feel of one of those 80s or 90s comedy movies that were just lighthearted and 'innocent'. I read it without knowing it was the third book in a series, though, so I guess start with the first? I don't know, it's good either way.
SpitfireIX
Philosopher
This is the only one of the four I've ever read, although I've seen a couple of dramatizations of Huckleberry Finn, and I really ought to read it, as it's available for free online.
I first read Tom Sawyer as a kid; my mom was an English teacher, and she had a copy. I really enjoyed it then. I reread it about 10 years ago when I gave a copy to my cousin's daughters; I thought that would be a good time. I still liked it.
More recently, I got a copy on CD at Half-Price books; I've listened to it twice in the past few years while driving back and forth between Indiana and Florida. I'd still say I like and recommend the book, but I agree with you that the plot seems somewhat disjointed in places. In particular, I now feel the whole subplot where the boys run away and reappear at their own funeral could have been trimmed considerably, if not cut altogether.
Pointless digression: A long time ago, I was a customer service representative at Sears, and I had an extended conversation with a customer named Thomas Sawyer. After I called him "Mr. Sawyer" for about the third time, he said, "Call me Tom. To me, Mr. Sawyer is my father." So I dutifully called him Tom for the rest of call, fighting hard to keep from laughing the whole time.
Although that wasn't as bad as the time I had to talk to Miss Muffet for about 20 minutes . . .People like coffee. Drinking coffee is a very common activity. It's one of the most common activities that people choose when arranging casual social gatherings. Here in Shanghai there are multiple cafes on every block. Like if you want to go somewhere for coffee you walk for two or three minutes to get from one cafe to the next. It's not surprising that different writers include people doing such a common activity in their stories.
Maybe it's actually happening in the stories a lot more than is common for most people. On the other hand, it's also possible that you just drink less coffee than average and so find it jarring in a way that most (coffee drinkers) wouldn't.