This is not a sports post. If what you’re looking for is more Al Davis or Jim Harbaugh or whatever, please skip this one.
This is about books. It’s about my reading life and how it almost came to an end because of “War and Peace” and how Huck Finn saved me.
I read a lot but I have gaps in my reading. I never read Dante and I can’t get into Proust and I just don’t get Joyce’s “Ulysses.”
Last summer I decided to close the “War and Peace” gap. I never had read it and had heard it’s the best novel ever written. I bought a famous, relatively-new translation by a husband-and-wife team who are going to town on all the Russian classics. Their names are Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Their edition is a hardcover and weighs in at about ten pounds. It’s a bear to read in bed.
It took me five months to read “War and Peace.” I am a very slow reader — I sound out the words in my head — and because this sucker is 1215 pages I just kept reading and reading. That would have been OK except — I’m ashamed to say this — I found “War and Peace” boring — Napoleon endlessly slogging through the Russian winter. Some nights I planned to read but I found other things to do. I watched a lot of sports which I don’t usually do at home.
In the meantime I was reading nothing else. “War and Peace” was making me stupid.
OK, I finally finished it — I survived Tolstoy. See you later, Leo.
And I picked up “Huckleberry Finn,” dear Huck. I had read it many times but I knew I needed Huck’s voice in my head to fall in love with reading again. And now I’m reading Huck as slowly as I can and I’m in raptures.
Why? Because Huck’s voice is so American, so plainspoken and innocent and poetic and Huck is observant and positive and kind and funny — sometimes without meaning to be. So I want to quote a paragraph of Huck speaking about life on the river raft for him and Jim. I present this for your enjoyment, and hope you love it as much as I do:
“I never felt easy till the raft was two mile below there and out in the middle of the Mississippi. Then we hung up our signal lantern, and judged that we was free and safe once more. I hadn’t had a bite to eat since yesterday, so Jim he got out some corn-dodgers and buttermilk, and pork and cabbage and greens — there ain’t nothing in the world so good when it’s cooked right — and whilst I eat my supper we talked and had a good time. I was powerful glad to get away from the feuds, and so was Jim to get away from the swamp. We said there weren’t no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.”
I love you, Huck
