the id, the ego, & the single misfiring brain cell - Latest Comments on i've been reading, too

Hinermad [Visitor] in response to: i've been reading, too

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 17:21:45 +0000

Ms. Bann,

I believe he was a riverboat pilot, the guy who drives the boat. His pen name was a term used by crewmen on a riverboat to let the pilot know the water was deep enough to navigate safely. (Mud and sand on the riverbed shifts constantly, causing safe channels to move over time.)

Dave

Hinermad [Visitor] in response to: i've been reading, too

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:49:43 +0000

he just smacks you over the head with them at will (ok…you didn’t put it quite like that)

Diana,

No, but just because I was trying to be polite. You’ve got Heinlein pegged.

Heh. Speaking of Heinlein, a current SF author whose blog I follow made a tongue-in-cheek remark about today’s Libertarians being annoyed that they aren’t secretly the illegitimate children of him and Ayn Rand. The author, John Scalzi, said that such a pairing was highly unlikely, since an encounter between them was likely to end in bloodshed. A commenter pointed out that Rand was a pacifist, but Scalzi replied that she’d never had to deal with Angry Bob.

Dave

Aunt Bann [Visitor] in response to: i've been reading, too

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 17:53:59 +0000

Yes, it does capture that period fairly well, Diana. And I agree about the Life on the Mississippi. It has been years since I read that one, too, but I remember that it chronicled his life as a riverboat captain (or something to do with riverboating, at least!).

admin [Member] in response to: i've been reading, too

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 17:23:57 +0000

Becky, I think you’ll very much enjoy the autobiography, then. Let me know what you think when you get around to it. :)

Aunt Bann, I’m not sure if the book should be pigeonholed in any place, but that’s just me. It does, however, capture a vanished period, culture, and dialects to the point of caricature, which alone makes it worth reading.

admin [Member] in response to: i've been reading, too

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 17:03:40 +0000

Hi, Dave! :)

I’ve found I can take Heinlein in small doses. I like his wisdom, as well, but as you point out, he doesn’t bother to incorporate his ideas smoothly into the narrative artfully; he just smacks you over the head with them at will (ok…you didn’t put it quite like that). And yeah…Twain tends to do the same thing with his fiction.

I think you will very much enjoy Twain’s nonfiction. Soon, I will read Life On the Mississippi, as it is one of his major non-fiction works that I have not yet read. And yeah…his stuff if full of wonderful quotes.

Aunt Bann [Visitor] in response to: i've been reading, too

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:13:45 +0000

It’s been years since I studied Huck Finn. Yes, I studied it—one of my college English teachers required it of me. I hardly remember the storyline—guess I need to hunt the book down and re-read it. Glad you are finally doing so, even if you DON’T care for it. It has, for years, been thought of as a “classic", which is why many English teachers require it! I’m thinking that history teachers (especially those who teach American history between the Revolution and the Civil War) are really the only ones who should use it for classes.

Keep up the interesting (and sometimes snide) writing!

becky Kaufman [Visitor] in response to: i've been reading, too

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 21:54:48 +0000

Diana, as you know this is several centuries past my period of supposed expertise, but I love Twain– both fiction and non-fiction. When I first read Huck Finn I was about ten or eleven years old and had just finished Tom Sawyer. and of course I didn’t like it one bit– it wasn’t the same as Tom – a bit like reading one of the other Brontes after falling in love with Jane Eyre. so I turned to the non-fiction –still have the used copy of Life on the Mississippi that I found in a used book store. And I fell in love again. I did read Huck again as a grad student– requisite course in Am Lit., and appreciated it much more. On the whole I do like the non-fiction a bit more. Haven’t really delved into the autobiography although I got it for Christmas in 2011.

Hinermad [Visitor] in response to: i've been reading, too

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:44:18 +0000

Diana,

I haven’t read any Twain except for Tom Sawyer, and being a fan of Robert Heinlein the “we interrupt this story to bring you the author’s views” shtick doesn’t bother me. At least in Sawyer it’s all exposition, not dialog. (Reading Tom and Becky Thatcher debating the changes to come in gender roles in the next century would have been a serious downer. I’d sooner treat warts with a dead cat. Thankfully, Twain obliged.)

I do generally appreciate the homespun wisdom in the many quotes attributed to Twain. If those are fair examples of his nonfiction, I’d say I need to read more Twain.

Dave