I read this one a little less than two months ago. This was a very tedious read. I didn't hate the beginning about his journey out West and read with curiosity his impressions of the Mormons (spoiler alert: he's not a fan), but once he got to Nevada and the gold mining it was as far from enjoyable as you could get. It's clear that he's stretching the truth about his experiences throughout the book in an attempt to be humorous. But the same playful humor found in Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer isn't found in this one which is neither playful or funny, other than one funny paragraph about ugly Mormon women which I'll share below. It was a long, boring read that I wouldn't recommend to anyone. If you are curious of his Mormon impressions, which were the most entertaining part of the book, then just read chapters 12-17 and thank me later that you didn't have to suffer through the rest of this book that is much longer than it needs to be. This is the book where you get the fairly well-known quotes about the Book of Mormon being "chloroform in print" and the line about if you removed 'And it came to pass' then the book would have only been a pamphlet, which are harmless, funny burns. But it seems that he thinks his serious criticisms are fatal but they're just flimsy and conclusory. For example, he says that every sentence or two, the language grows too modern (without citing any examples) and so Joseph Smith had to throw in scriptural sounding phrases, using "exceeding sore," "hid up," and "wherefore" as examples, which is ridiculous. Suddenly the fact that the word "wherefore" appears in the Book of Mormon is worth pointing to as an evidence that Joseph Smith made it up? Laughably weak criticism. He also quotes the entirety of the witnesses from the three and eight witnesses and only sarcastically points to how they "hefted" the plates as a reason why he is now convinced of the truth of their witness. Weird. Then he flat out lies and makes fun of how Nephi built the ship in a single day even though the text clearly states it took many days which could be months or even years. Making chloroform jokes is fine, but clear misleading lies are just lame. He concludes one chapter by calling it "stupid and tiresome to read, but there is nothing vicious in its teachings." The irony of saying this when the Book of Mormon is infinitely more interesting and entertaining than Twain's Roughing It which was a true slog to get through.
Some Mormon tidbits from Twain:
"Next day we strolled about everywhere through the broad, straight, level streets, and enjoyed the pleasant strangeness of a city of fifteen thousand inhabitants with no loafers perceptible in it; and no visible drunkards or noisy people... a grand general air of neatness, repair, thrift and comfort, around and about and over the whole....intent faces and busy hands were to be seen wherever one looked."
"Salt Lake City was healthy - an extremely healthy city. They declared there was only one physician in the place and he was arrested every week regularly and held to answer under the vagrant act for having 'no visible means of support.'"
"Our stay in Salt Lake City amounted to only two days, and therefore we had not time to make the customary inquisition into the workings of polygamy and get up the usual statistics and deductions preparatory to calling the attention of the nation at large once more to the matter. I had the will to do it. With the gushing self-sufficiency of youth I was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve a great reform here - until I saw the Mormon women. Then I was touched. My heart was wiser than my head. It warmed toward these poor, ungainly, and pathetically 'homely' creatures, and as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I said, 'No - the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure - and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.'"
I did like this insight during his gold digging time in Nevada, which, again ironically, reminds one of his negative judgment of the Mormon people from a few chapters earlier:
"Moralizing, I observed, then, that 'all that glitters is not gold.' Mr. Ballou said I could go further than that, and lay it up among my treasures of knowledge, that nothing that glitters is gold. So I learned then, once for all, that gold in its native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and that only lowborn metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter. However, like the rest of the world, I still go on underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica. Commonplace human nature cannot rise above that.
Rankings of Mark Twain books I've read:
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
- Roughing It
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