The Best Short Stories of Mark Twain Book

A mix of comedy and some hard lessons about life, this was a fascinating set of short stories. Some of the stories seemed to be way ahead of their time with the eccentric sense of humor showing up way back in the 1860s. There was one story about a crazy newspaper editor that wanted to write stories about some of the inhabitants of the town to make them all sound like terrible people. It sounded just a little like some of William S. Burroughs works. The diaries of Adam and Eve were funny because he portrayed them as being very human with lots of funny observations about each other and the world around them. It was funny to read about how they would observe animals and other people for the first time starting off in life as adults with great vocabularies. I like how Adam's entries on Sundays were always "Pulled through." Then the diaries would eventually flash forward way into the future and the change in the person was really powerful. There were a few stories about the perils of money. There was even one or two stories that were very dark. I loved the sarcasm about the guy who bought all the lightning rods just to make the salesman go away and how it attracted terrible thunderstorms to their house and scared away all the neighbors. This collection is a great way to appreciate Mark Twain's quirky sense of humor and his wisdom about human nature. He must have met lots of crazy people over the course of his life.