The Best Place

(via NPR)

So, I’ve recently been trying to read through some Mark Twain. This one, in fact:

The Innocents Abroad started out very promising. The idea to read this book had been kicking around in my head for awhile, when lo, I found a copy at the book fair for 75 cents. Perfect! However, I’m about halfway through and I’m not sure I can stand any more of Mark Twain’s grumblings about Europe. I mean, sometimes it’s really entertaining. This is especially true when he goes into storyteller mode and gets completely off tangent in the retelling of some old Italian legend that he heard about. That’s when the Mark Twain I love shows through. But more often than not, he’s just being a grumbly gus and complaining about seeing too many paintings by Michelangelo or too many churches with too many priests in them for his liking. So honestly, I don’t really care if he ever gets to the top of Mount Vesuvius or if the mule he’s riding falls over the side somewhere along the way. I already read the last chapter, so I know he makes it back to New York safely. But of his adventures in Greece, Russia, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel? I’ll just extrapolate from his opinions on Spain, Morocco, France, and Italy. I think I’ve got the general idea: America is great, the old world is old, and the people there are ignorant, uncouth, and impolite.

Thus reconciled, I endeavored to begin a new book. This one was rescued from a bookshelf in the house of a deceased lady…so significantly cheaper than 75 cents. It also smells a little old.

I read Brave New World way back in high school. I think I liked it a lot, but it’s hard to say. Mostly, I blame that on the way we discussed it in class. We played a game where every day in class we would circle up the desks and get asked trivia from the previous night’s reading assignment. If you didn’t get the answer correct, the question would pass on to the person to your right (for more points, I think?). I have a pretty good head for trivial minutiae, so I did very well in this game. I also realized that if I sat next to the dumbest girl in the class, I could get way more points. I excelled at this game, but it came at the expense of really being able to remember the novel. I can recall the name of the indian tribe who live in the desert outside of the utopian (or was it dystopian?) civilization, but not the plot points of the book. Still, I remembered liking the book immensely.

With that in mind, I dove into Eyeless in Gaza. And then I hit a wall. I do not care for Aldous Huxley’s writing style one bit. The prose does not do it for me. So three chapters down, and I’m out. Hopefully the next book I pick up I can actually finish, much less enjoy.