I journeyed with Mark Twain on the stagecoach to his first destination, Carson City, Nevada. I enjoyed his anecdotes about the people he met and the descriptions of the stations and towns he passed through, including Salt Lake City with his account of the Mormons. (So much enjoyed, that I laughed out loud much of the way.) When reading Mark Twain, never skip around his digressions. The story about the camel in Syria, though it had nothing to do with this trip, still makes me laugh out loud. Things that would have been tragic or disgusting to most people are rendered, by Twain's gross understatement, to be quite hysterical! Normally, I put aside prodigious books for a time to read something else. This it the same, but unlike others I have put aside, the reading of it is not prodigious, it is the heft of the Heritage Edition I am reading--it must weigh 15 pounds, and my arthritis is not up to it for long. So, I'll be back, but for now, I am moving on.
I have now started By Blood We Live, a collection of short stories about vampires, exploring the different kind of vampires written about by contemporary adult authors. I've read stories by Neil Gaiman (an old telling of the Snow White story in which Snow is a vampire and her step-mother witch is the tragic heroine), Anne Rice about a traditional vampire, and am now into a story by Harry Turtledove. Quite enjoyable....
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