I'm listening to Mark Chernow's book about Twain . Clemens is idealistic and doesn't like racism until he goes to New York, and then he becomes an out of town rube from Hannibal Missouri, and racist. He rejects a religious life because they support slavery. He's a prankster, joker, comedian, story teller. He works as a printer, but he's fairly internerant. His brother found a slave on an island, and that is the basis for Jim in Huck Finn, the point of listening to this book is to give some background to understand a rereading that book. Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in 1835. Samuel refused to go to school. His mother was the story teller and held the family's emotion. The family's fortunes would go up and down and at one point his mother had to cook for a family so the family could have housing. The father was a humorless judge, among other things. Clemens remembers one joke in his life with his father. His father got sick and died young. Should we see...
Introduction: Thomas Pynchon 's probable last novel drops October 7th, he's 88 for goodness sakes, and I've been trying to force myself to finish Gravity's Rainbow . I'm in the 500's of a 760 page novel for the longest times as I join 3 books clubs, and don't really follow through with most of the book. It's October now and there's not much time before the book comes out. I'm on page 505 of Gravity's Rainbow on October 1st and I've got to read 43 pages a day, which sounds easy, but not with Pynchon when you're looking up everything. I've posted a lot about looking things up, but I can't do that down the home stretch. I can't write about what an ax bell is, a new discovery of something in the world I didn't know existed. That's what I like about Pynchon, he's always teaching me things. I will update this post as I get the book and read it. There are just too many amazing quotations (p. 509 GR): "Tempor...