With this year’s book numbers surpassing last year’s total already, I really should finish discussing the last book on that list.
67. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain
Not sure when, if ever, I’d have got to reading this myself, but Heather did this as a Craftlit book last year and DH and I both greatly enjoyed it.
I previously mentioned this while listening to it.
Twain is often bitingly cynical in this novel, and his characters aren’t always all that likeable either. Heather’s commentary certainly helped to bring out the themes, however. As someone who’d never read it, but thought she knew the basic premise, the ending was rather a dark shock, and has overshadowed my memories of the earlier humour. Neither Twain nor The Boss (our narrator) pull many punches at all, and we have many an attack on 19th century values, as caricatured in a pretend early medieval England. Our eponymous protagonist is rather an anti-hero in many ways, and likes to make fun of basically everyone with whom he comes into contact, often somewhat cruelly.
It doesn’t sound like I enjoyed the book, does it? I actually did enjoy a lot of it, and certainly felt the rest was worthwhile. The reading was very good, and I’d recommend the Craftlit commentary (as always) too.
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