Pudd'nhead Wilson

First book done!

At a lean 139 pages, this was my way of getting a head start on things, of knocking out one all quick-like.

What to say about a book that's over 100 years old?

The introduction by Langston Hughes gave me the impression that it would be nearly humorless, a very serious story about a very serious subject. And yes, the subject was very serious (slavery, nature vs nurture, MURDER!) but it was still Mark Twain. It was still a breezy, entertaining read that had me giggling fairly frequently.

The main thing though was the arbitrariness that race was presented in. The whole "if you're 1/32nd black then you are a slave" thing. How that 1/32nd made any sort of difference. My first thought was that I felt bad for the real Thomas A Becket, the one switched in his infancy to be a slave when he should have rightfully been free. Now obviously there is no way we should justifiably feel any worse for him than we do for the other slaves, because there is no difference between being made a slave before you know what's what and being made a slave from birth. And Twain tends to avoid writing much about this injustice here. He is just an innocent bystander but with how big of a douche the fake Thomas A Becket is, we just wonder what the real Tom would have done in the situation. But what about all slaves, had they been given a fair shot at life?

And here we are in 2012 and I am doing little more than stating the obvious. We know that slavery is wrong and has left a huge scar on our country's legacy. What can be pulled from this book that can teach us real lessons today?

Mostly it's the people of the town. How much they are like the people of today, easily swayed, not very bright, mob mentality. People who will call someone a "Pudd'nhead" for making an ironic comment that they don't understand. They are fascinated by the foreigners from Italy, and then want their blood based on some fairly weak circumstantial evidence. These are our juries; these are our voters. Easily swayed, easily swayed back. This is how our country had slavery and how now the tea party has taken over the media and the republican party. This is how George W Bush got elected to a second term before we were smart enough to try something different but then 2 years later brought more of the same fools into congress to react to that. This is us.

Finally, I'd like to remark on probably my favorite parts of the book. At the beginning of each chapter are excerpts from Wilson's calendar. These bite-sized snippets of Twain's wit (and in some cases, extreme pessimism) are some of the best takeaways in the book. Here is one of extreme pessimism that I found particularly...particular:

"All say, 'how hard it is to have to die' -- a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live."