Andrew's review
Roughing It (Signet Classics)
by Mark Twain
Andrew's review
Roughing It (Signet Classics) by Mark Twain
Andrew's review
rating:
recommended for: aspiring adventurers, fans of side-splitting comedy; hoboes
This is one of my favorite books of all time, and my favorite by Twain. I like vignettes - they're easy to digest and not too hard on the constitution - and this book is full of little tales. Tales within tales, and Twain at his funniest. He's so dry you want to go get some water, but at the root of it all there's this unassuming acceptance that this is the way things are. The matter-of-fact nature is really what makes this book: Twain, a young journalist (which helps when the tales get tall; we credit the journalist with the truth much more easily than a novelist), goes on a trip out to see the gold rush in California, and gets caught up everywhere in between, smoking a pipe and with all manner of privation besetting the journey. And being young enough to be invincible (and believe everything that he sees with his own two eyes) you get a real sense of how awful travel was in the olden days, and a real sense of how much more fun it was, too. I can't really describe most of it; you just...more
