Lazy, bored, tired, old?

It's been nearly a year since I wrote here about anything I read.

Partly that's because reading got interrupted. I bought a book for my "Nook" to take on a family vacation to Wyoming. I figured I wouldn't have much time to read while in Jackson Hole and Yellowstone with children and grandchildren along. That was correct, but then about two-thirds of the way through a now-forgotten book, the reader stopped working. It turned out that the "book" I had was corrupted, but I never got to finish it. The Nook has been sitting on a shelf since.

A year before the vacation, I bought a used copy of a recommended Jo Nesbø book. Following the Scandinavian democratic socialist rules for mystery/thrillers, Nesbø was telling several stories at once. Set in different times and places with few overlapping characters (at least at the beginning), I found it very hard to keep track of things. I started the book several times. The last time I started it I tried taking notes inside the front cover so I could keep track of people and stories. It wasn't much help.

After vacation, I didn't go near it. [However, last fall we got hooked on a Norwegian television mini-series titled Okkupert (Occupied in English). While written by Karianne Lund and Erik Skjoldbjaerg, the story was outlined by Jo Nesbø. Good for him. The series was intriguing and well done. It was available on Netflix and popular enough (in spite of the need for sub-titles) to get Norwegian television to order a second season (without subtitles for Norwegians). It's a cautionary tale about how a Western democracy could lose its democracy, that Americans should pay close attention to. (And the defenders of the democracy in the script are not the 2nd Amendment purist, anti-government backwoodsmen envisioned by the Tea Party or by Kevin Reynolds in Red Dawn.)]

When I did pick up a book to read, I did so in response to seeing an interview of Aasif Mandvion TV. He's best known as the Senior Muslim Correspondent for Jon Stewart's Daily Show. Some things he said in the interview (now forgotten by me) made this serious actor sound intriguing, so I bought his book: No Land's Man.

The title is apt. The book is about Mandvi's search for identity. He is culturally a Muslim, born in northern India. His family moved to Bradford, England when he was a child. Bradford is a West Yorkshire city that offered lots of jobs in its 19th century mills. Not so much any more. It's one of those areas that voted heavily for Brexit. Mandvi went to grammar school and then to a residential boy's school. Mandvi didn't fit in. He didn't know where he might fit in.

The search didn't get any easier in Tampa, Florida where his family moved when he was 16. It was his mother, sensing his unease, who suggested he take an acting class. That was how he found a "place" in a large suburban American high school dominated by jocks and white kids. He wrote, "I had been blown this way and that my entire life, wearing whatever identity I could in order to be accepted. Perhaps this was why I had chosen to become an actor. Seeking invisibility and notoriety at the same time is something actors understand. I was always jealous of those people that knew who they were."

From stories about his well-received one-man show on Broadway to his hiring by Jon Stewart to Brooke Shield's New Year's Eve party, Mandvi tells stories well. There's a sense of humor in them, but this is serious reflection. Some of us white natives wonder where we fit it, too. Not to the degree a dark skinned immigrant wonders, but the questions exist for me too.  I enjoyed this little book.

Have you read No Land's Man? How did you react to it? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

_________________________
Aasif Mandvi On Life As A 'No Land's Man' from Fresh Air

Thrity Umrigar's review in the Boston Globe

Dwight Garner's review in The New York Times

Sucker!

It was more than 50 years ago when I first read the story about Tom Sawyer and the fence Aunt Polly tried to make him paint. My reaction then, and when I read Tom Sawyer to young David a few years ago, was that Hannibal, Missouri must have been full of dumb, gullible, backwoods boobs.

Then Mark Twain, 100 years dead, proved me to be a dumb, gullible, backwoods boob, too. He sold me a copy of his so-called autobiography.

I was excited to read Twain's autobiography, and he sold it well. I bought a copy during the week of its release. "Don't publish this until I've been dead for 100 years," he said. The purpose was to allow him to say what he really thought without earning the enmity of the people he wrote about.

Well, old guy, nobody cares about or even knows most of the people you wrote about. Even your good buddy General/President Grant is pretty much forgotten, except as a notorious drunk.

Twain might have begun doing an autobiography. Some of the opening chapters are about his family and the childhood he heard about, but was too young to remember. He quickly became bored with that. A few years later, he started again. The second time, he decided to write about what he was interested in and change topics whenever his interests change. Sometimes his interests waned in the middle of a story. Okay, most of the stories weren't interesting to start with.

Every once in awhile, Twain told a good one. In that way he resembled my blogger friend Sank. Twain would tell an amusing anecdote with some insightful commentary. Sank does it more often than Twain did. Those moments were why I kept reading (actually skimming). I kept at that skimming for over a month. Toward the end of the book, Twain goes on quite awhile about his daughter Susy, who died at age 24. It was touching and the man's pain was palpable. The book is 736 pages. Well, there are 276 pages of notes and index, but the few gems don't make the other 460 pages worth the effort. Twain needed an editor.

Oh, but there was a whole team of editors. Editors from the University of California. Instead of editing, they collected every little word Twain wrote with the note "autobiography" appended to it and put them all in this book. Well not all. They promise more volumes. Oh, goody.

I find myself in agreement with Garrison Keillor. He reviewed this book for the New York Times. If you want a more complete or informed consideration, read it. Skip the book.

---

• Wikipedia on the autobiography
• The Autobiography of Mark Twain – a review by Tim Adams in The Guardian.
• Mark Twain's Amazing Embargo, a review by Craig Fehrman at Slate.com

---

Usually, I put a link here so you can easily buy a copy of the book. No link this time. Go the library, check out a collection of Twain's short stories and read those.

---