The Autobiography of Mark Twain

I tried to read this "book" earlier this year, and gave up, not due to frustration, but rather because it was not a pleasant experience. The book is as large as a small mailbox and as heavy as a small bowling ball. A little difficult to rest on your tummy while reading in bed.

I wanted to read it because I so much enjoyed "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." But, rather than being an entertaining and enlightening work about one of the best loved and widest read American humorists and writer, it turned out to be a chest beating, self-celebrating amalgamation devoted to the brilliance of the UC Berkeley editors who, after 20 some years of research determined that Samuel Clemens intended that his autobiography be published in the order in which he dictated it. Duh?

The first 200 plus pages are devoted to describing in painful detail how the diligent editors gathered, assessed and sorted various works and their significance to this splendid volume. Only after wading through all this do you get to the actual autobiography, by which time I had lost interest. It is very much like coming upon a steaming pile of horseshit, you know there are some golden grains of oats in there, but who wants to go pawing (with your readers eyes) through all the crap to find them?

Perhaps someday an enlightened editor will have a flash of inspiration and just publish Clemens' tapes as he had intended and provide something the common man (who Clemens so obviously loved) can enjoy. This present work is more like a doctoral thesis written by a committee intended for use only by like-minded souls.