The Connie Willis . Net Blog. WEBSITE UPDATE 8/1. BOOKS I LOVE: THE CONNECTICUT CONTINGENTWe went to Connecticut this summer on a combined research and family trip. It’s our fiftieth wedding anniversary this year, so my husband and our daughter and I went back to Branford, Connecticut, where we lived when we were first married, to visit our old haunts.

We did a lot of other stuff, too, and saw submarines, dinosaur tracks, panes of propped- up glass like the ones in Bob Shaw’s “The Light of Other Days,” waterfalls, Gillette Castle, and Gilmore Girl- esque village greens (about which more in later posts). And we visited assorted literary haunts, of which there are tons. Authors from Arthur Miller to Maurice Sendak, Wallace Stevens, Rex Stout, Suzanne Collins, and Ira Levin lived there.

Here are my favorite Connecticut- connected books: 1. LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI by Mark Twain. People always associate Mark Twain with Hannibal, Missouri, and the Mississippi, but he actually wrote most of his novels, including LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI, while living in Hartford, Connecticut, in a gaudy red mansion that his biographer called “part steamboat, part medieval fortress, part cuckoo clock.”The house was filled with cats–“A home without a cat–and a well- fed, well- petted and properly revered cat–may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?” he wrote–and little girls, whom he also adored, and he told them stories, watched the plays they put on, was the elephant on their safaris, and let them play with the carved wooden cherubs that formed the posters of their bed, allowing them to put diapers and talcum powder on them. Watch The Naked Gun: From The Files Of Police Squad! Online (2017) on this page. Watch Orthodox Online Moviesdbz'>Watch Orthodox Online Moviesdbz. And somehow find time to write LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI.

It’s a wonderful, funny, rambling memoir that feels less like a book than like sitting on the porch of Mark Twain’s Hartford house, watching him smoke his cigars and listening to him talk. The book’s got wild tales, jokes, tragic stories, and reminiscences of his days as a steamboat pilot. My favorite thing in the whole book is his description of how he “learned the river” and went from merely seeing it as beautiful to knowing what every sandbar and sunset and submerged log meant.

Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet,” he wrote, “I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!”I’ve always felt that passage (and the whole book) was as much about being a writer as about being a riverboat pilot, and maybe that’s why it’s remained my favorite, though I also love ROUGHING IT, THE INNOCENTS ABROAD, and THE PERSONAL REFLECTIONS OF JOAN OF ARC. And, of course, HUCK FINN. It’s one of those “too good to be true” coincidences that the two great classics of American literature about race and slavery, THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, were written within shouting distance of each other, and together they changed the way Americans felt about race and slavery. It’s hard to say which book had the greater impact on the subject, though HUCK FINN is clearly the better of the two and it’s quite possibly The Great American Novel.

It’s also fun to read and as relevant now as the day it was written, and I saw the line “Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?” quoted on a political website just the other day. UNCLE TOM’S CABIN by Harriet Beecher Stowe. UNCLE TOM’S CABIN isn’t nearly as fun to read, and in fact, hardly anybody has. But in spite of that, it’s one of those books everybody knows all about–or thinks they do. They’re familiar with Eliza’s flight across the frozen river with her baby, pursued by the slaveowner and his bloodhounds, and about Topsy and Little Eva. They’ve seen the play, “The Small House of Uncle Thomas” in THE KING AND I (“Run from Simon, run, Eliza, run!”), and they know that when Abraham Lincoln met the author, he said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” The terms “Uncle Tom” and “Simon Legree” have entered into the lexicon, and everybody has an opinion about the book, usually that it’s badly written, overly sentimental anti- slavery propaganda, and full of demeaning stereotypes.

But nobody’s actually read it. Which is too bad, because like most really famous books, it’s much different from its common image. And so’s the author. Harriet Beecher Stowe wasn’t just any “little woman.” She was the daughter of a famous preacher and the sister of an even MORE famous one, and her whole family was right in the thick of the abolitionist movement.

When Harriet found out that her black servant girl’s former owner was looking for her, she, her husband, and her brother hustled the girl to safety, “under cover of night and armed with guns.”She interviewed numerous liberated slaves for the book and asked Frederick Douglass to put her in touch with others so she could “make a picture that shall be graphic and true to nature in its details,” and her book presented a number of things that were new to her readers: the barbarity of slave auctions and of families being torn apart as slaves were sold down the river, the forcing of slaves to whip each other, the ruthless hunting down of escaped slaves. Dark Blue Full Movie Part 1. She personalized slavery and made its horrors real, and the result was a book that had more influence on events than possibly any other novel ever written.

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Just like her book isn’t what you’ve been led to believe, neither is she. She wasn’t a humorless fanatic; she was intelligent and charming and funny. She lived right across the street from Mark Twain, and she rose enormously in my regard when I found out she absolutely adored him. Mark Twain once wrote, “When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade, without further introduction,” and I feel the same about Mark Twain. Nobody can really call themselves a writer if they don’t love Mark Twain and appreciate his humor.

Harriet clearly did. She loved to tell the story of how she was leaving for an extended trip, and Mark Twain, when he found out, came running over to tell her goodbye. He had been at breakfast, so he came in just his shirt and trousers, with no coat, and when he went back home, his wife Olivia, ever the proper Victorian, was horrified.

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