Mark Twain quotes

Mark Twain on Reading

Photo courtesy of Dave Thomson

I don't believe any of you have ever read Paradise Lost and you don't want to. That's something that you just want to take on trust. It's a classic... something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
- "Disappearance of Literature" speech

I do not read anything but history and biography. You perceive that for me to presume to indicate the hundred authors which a person ought to read, would be folly. No, leave me out: My testimony would not be valuable.
- letter to Joseph B. Gilder, 5/16/1886

It is so unsatisfactory to read a noble passage and have no one you love at hand to share the happiness with you. And it is unsatisfactory to read to one's self anyhow--for the uttered voice so heightens the expression.
- My Father Mark Twain, Clara Clemens

Don't explain your author, read him right and he explains himself.
- Letter to Cordelia Welsh Foote of Cincinnati, 12/2/1887. Reprinted in When Huck Finn Went Highbrow, DeCasseres

Misattributed quote:

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.

- In Nice Guys Finish Seventh, (1992) by Ralph Keyes: "Abby Van Buren once made this observation in her advice column. A reader said she should have credited the thought to Mark Twain. Abby apologized, explaining that she genuinely thought the idea was her own. Perhaps it was. Although this saying is often attributed to Twain, no one has ever confirmed that he said it" (p. 111).

However, a subsequent researcher reports finding the quote in a newspaper, The Chicago Heights Star, Chicago, Illinois, 1 Feb 1949, as a stand alone quote attributed to Mark Twain. This places it much earlier than "Dear Abby," but with no acceptable confirmation of source.

theteach

Overlooked Fiction

Besides a great post entitled "Overlooked Fiction", Slate Magazine (scroll down to the end of the post) offers

Prominent writers (like Scott Turow, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Connolly) confess their favorite beach reads here
Books prominent critics haven't read here
Roundup of the books that famous people loved in college here
Famous books that prominent critics haven't read here

This last is the best, though. The article is called "The Literary Critic's Shelf of Shame." Here's a quote that should give high schoolers a lift:

The most distressing revelation is that many of the authors deemed most impenetrable—Dickens, Hawthorne, the Brontës, Melville—are mainstays on high-school and college freshman reading lists. Students will either take heart or sigh in frustration. On the one hand, it's comforting to know that the pros couldn't slog through these books either. But on the other: If the experts couldn't get through them, how are you supposed to?

Critics haven't read Ulysses, The Scarlet Letter, Anna Karenina, War and Peace. A reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer, Colin Romano admits to having recently read Crime and Punishment.

I recently TAUGHT Crime and Punishment to my Books & Brunch classes at a local community college. Most of them loved? liked it very much. Mr. Romano is right the crime does come first and then there are another 500 pages about guilt, repentence and redemption. Sound good?

Enjoy! Oh, and Happy Halloween!
the teach :)