From the shelves of the Paco library

Two freebies via Kindle/Amazon.

I. The Innocents Abroad

In 1867, Mark Twain embarked on a grand tour, encompassing Mediterranean Europe and the Holy Land, with side trips to Constantinople and Odessa. Twain traveled with an open mind, but not an empty one, so the book is filled with honest, uninhibited observations, frequently hilarious, occasionally somber, and sometimes even nearly worshipful.

Twain playfully builds up the trip in the opening chapter, quoting, in its entirety, the advertisement that had originally prompted his interest. He also notes, with awe, that the group of tourists is to be joined by a high panjandrum of the U.S. government:

I was proud to observe that among our excursionists were three ministers of the gospel, eight doctors, sixteen or eighteen ladies, several military and naval chieftains with sounding titles, an ample crop of “Professors” of various kinds, and a gentleman who had “COMMISSIONER OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TO EUROPE, ASIA AND AFRICA” thundering after his name in one awful blast!...I had schooled myself to expect an imposing array of military and naval heroes and to have to set that back seat still further back in consequence of it maybe; but I state frankly that I was all unprepared for this crusher…Ah, if I had only known then that he was only a common mortal, and that his mission had nothing more overpowering about it than the collecting of seeds and uncommon yams and extraordinary cabbages and peculiar bullfrogs for that poor, useless, innocent, mildewed old fossil the Smithsonian Institute…

In Italy and France, Twain and his boisterous friends kept up a running battle with guides and would-be guides, some of whom seemed far more interested in steering their charges toward the shops of friends and relatives than toward the famous sites that they wanted (or felt compelled) to see.

In the Crimea, the passengers encountered an instance of wonderful serendipity, and were invited to take tea with the Czar and to visit the palace of one of the Grand Dukes. The tourists were completely charmed by their hosts. Twain writes, “When it was time to go, we bade our distinguished hosts good-bye, and they retired happy and contented to their apartments to count their spoons.”

The Holy Land, Twain found disappointing in many ways. The Bible stories of kings and armies had created a picture of vastness, yet, crossed and re-crossed on donkeys and on foot, the region taught Twain that most of the signal events occurred in an area that would have fit into a typical eastern American state (with several counties left over). He was also appalled by the corruption and incompetence of Ottoman governance, the narrow-minded sectarian strife that plagued the holy places, the squalid living conditions of the denizens of small villages and the constant clamoring for “bucksheesh”. One of the most amusing refrains in this book is Twain’s periodic (and sarcastic) notations of the great disparity between what he saw and experienced, and the heavily romanticized versions of travelers such as William Cowper Prime. Near the end of his visit, he wrote:

We do not think, in the holy places; we think in bed, afterwards, when the glare and the noise, and the confusion are gone, and in fancy we revisit alone, the solemn monuments of the past, and summon the phantom pageants of an age that has passed away.

First published in 1869, Innocents Abroad is one of the most famous, and still very popular, travel books written by an American author. By turns funny and bitter, perhaps the thing that most stands out, to me, is this sad fact: traveling around the Middle East in 1867 was safer, in many ways, than it is today.

II. A Man of Means

First published between May and October of 1916 in the Pictorial Review, these six stories by P.G. Wodehouse have now been gathered together in one volume. They feature Roland Bleke, an inoffensive young man whose main fault consists in becoming infatuated with girls who look upon him primarily as a meal ticket; and as his bank account grows fatter – with the initial impetus of a winning sweeps ticket that he had completely forgotten about, further supplemented by a cascade of lucky investments – the ambitions of his lady friends expand accordingly. Here is a sample of Wodehouse’s typically hilarious prose, from the fourth story in the series (Roland has rashly invested in a newspaper, motivated exclusively by a desire to save the job of a pretty employee, and his chief editor - worshipped by the lady in question - has been beaten up by a rough customer unhappy with a tabloid-style exposé):

Miss March turned on her heel. It was plain that she regarded him as a worm. Roland did not like being thought a worm, but it was infinitely better than being regarded as an interesting case by the house-surgeon of a hospital. He belonged to the school of thought which holds that is better that people should say of you, “There he goes!” than that they should say, “How peaceful he looks.”

Light-hearted and fun in their own right, these early stories are interesting, as well, as a sort of foreshadowing of the future Bertie Wooster.