Well, not Twain himself, but the mullets he ascribed to nobility in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, that is… About bedtime I took the king to my private quarters to cut his hair and help him get the hang of the lowly raiment he was to wear. The high classes wore their hair […]
Tag: Mark Twain
A note from Mark Twain, to help put the animated comments of the day in perspective. Heated moments when dealing with elections are nothing new… I’ve been reading books with the boys this year that tie into their history studies. We spent a day on Chapter 13 of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King […]
We are a couple of chapters away from finishing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, just in time for the class the oldest boy is taking. The ladies at LitWits have posted resources pages at their site (update: Tom Sawyer booklet not consistently available) and on their Pinterest board. Be sure to check out their other book resources […]
I’ve been reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer with the boys and we’ve been having a lot of fun with it. I highly recommend the unabridged Sterling illustrated edition pictured. They enjoy the rich watercolors by Robert Ingpen while I appreciate the quality feel of the book. Oh yeah…we’re enjoying the story, too. There are […]
Reading (or in this case, listening to) Mark Twain proves to be a challenging task for me. I don’t mind the multiple layers of irony and ambiguity…in fact I find that one of his most enjoyable features. There are sublime moments in his writing, such as the passage I quoted in the previous post regarding […]
As I mentioned in a previous post, I found the audiobook version of Life on the Mississippi very enjoyable. Narrator Grover Gardner does a wonderful job of capturing the home-spun charm of Mark Twain’s fictionalized experience with the river. The book has two general storylines—Twain’s training to be a steamboat pilot and his taking a […]
I’ve been listening to Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi during my commute and thoroughly enjoying it. Presented without comment is a section I heard this morning on the Vicksburg National Cemetery: The grounds are nobly situated; being very high and commanding a wide prospect of land and river. They are tastefully laid out in […]
Mark Twain’s King Leopold’s Soliloquy engages the atrocities in the Congo differently than Conrad—through satire. While the subject matter hardly seems like it would lend itself to such an approach, Twain does a good job at lampooning King Leopold II and issuing a call to end the hellish arrangement. The American Museum of Natural History […]