I am not sure where I got the desire to read Twain, but maybe it was from the Greg Bottom’s book I recently read. Anyway, I picked up “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” and read a fair amount of that, and I will get back to it, but I really wanted to read Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. So I grabbed them both on a recent trip, and read Tom Sawyer first based on published date.

This book contains “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” “Tom Sawyer Abroad,” and “Tom Sawyer, Detective.” All are entertaining reads, though it does take a little time to get used to the writing with all the misspelled words, “southern grammar,” etc.

Only a few quotes:

He had discovered a great law of human action — without knowing it — namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

…

I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.

This one goes along with “Wild at Heart,” which I am also reading now (look for a post in the next few weeks…) In that book, masculinity, or a man’s heart, is defined as having three main desires, one of which is “a battle to fight,” or put in other words, “Do I have what it takes?”

… he said it ‘most broke his heart to think how time was slipping away, and him getting older and older, and no wars breaking out and no way of making a name for himself that he could see. Now that is the ways boys is always thinking, but he was the first one I ever heard come out and say it.