The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain: Timeless and free!
5 stars
To be honest, this was sort of a "desperation" book; one of many that I've picked up from the three for a dollar room at the Boston Book Annex which was down the street from my workplace at the time but is now, sadly, long gone. They had a beautiful pair of bookstore cats, one of whom would lick my hand endlessly if I held it in front of him.
At three for a buck I could pick up all sorts of odd books that I wouldn't normally try. The Twain book didn't really fall into that category, of course; I'd read a fair amount of Twain. But the thing about this edition was that it was over 600 pages long with small type; it was very compact.
Anyway, I grabbed the Twain collection (which also includes short stand-alone fiction taken from within longer novels and non-fiction books) because it …
To be honest, this was sort of a "desperation" book; one of many that I've picked up from the three for a dollar room at the Boston Book Annex which was down the street from my workplace at the time but is now, sadly, long gone. They had a beautiful pair of bookstore cats, one of whom would lick my hand endlessly if I held it in front of him.
At three for a buck I could pick up all sorts of odd books that I wouldn't normally try. The Twain book didn't really fall into that category, of course; I'd read a fair amount of Twain. But the thing about this edition was that it was over 600 pages long with small type; it was very compact.
Anyway, I grabbed the Twain collection (which also includes short stand-alone fiction taken from within longer novels and non-fiction books) because it was long, not too big (the paper is extremely thin and delicate), and would take a long time to read. I expected that it might be a little dull. Twain's language has dated a bit, after all. But the old boy has life in him yet.
I laughed out loud - loudly - more than once as I was reading in on the train, and one story got me so choked up that I spent half an hour fighting back tears. Yes, I'm a big sap. No, I'm not going to tell you which story.
I was sorry when I came to the end of the book.
Of course, all of Mark Twain's books have long since entered the public domain, and are available free in all the major ebook formats on Project Gutenberg.