The Innocents Abroad

The Innocents Abroad, or A New Pilgrim's Progress

By Mark Twain

A detailed narrative of a long excursion with a group of fellow travelers to the Holy Land shortly after the Civil War aboard the vessel Quaker City. The humorous account covers his visits to Paris, Italy, Greece, Egypt and the Holy Land. At times irreverent, it is always entertaining.

So I finally, finally finished The Innocents Abroad. I think it took me longer to read it than it took Mark Twain to get on a steamship, sail over to Europe, tour the continent, head out to the Holy Land, visit approximately one million sights of interest, and return to the United States. It's a long frickin' book!  And it's a wee bit old-fashioned, so you sometimes get ahead of yourself if you skim too much.  And the second half is basically all biblical, which I have very little interest in or knowledge of, so that part was semi-nonsensical to me.

However, do not let that dissuade you from picking this up! I found it to be a delightful travelogue, and very comedic, a la his usual style, even if it did suffer at points from a light coating of racism and long-windedness.  To be fair, I don't think the racism was as bad as it could have been considering the time period and circumstances.  Twain is pretty cynical in general, and rarely complimentary of any ethnicity or country (with the possible exception of Russia, amusing in retrospect), and I would agree that western travelers can find traveling in eastern countries very disorienting and the begging to be unpleasant, so I didn't find it (myself) to put me off the book entirely. I mean, The Egg and I raised a lot more of my eyebrows and that was written by Betty MacDonald in 1945. 

This is one book that I would really love to read an annotated version of. From the beginning, just when he's talking about the hooded women of the Azores, and sights of Pompeii, and then going into the valleys of Damascus and Syria, and the seashell path in the Caucuses, I just really wanted to see pictures of what he describes so evocatively, and chart their path, and get historical background.  I found myself on wikipedia getting lost in the history of the tsars and looking up old black and white pictures, and color pictures and maps and just taking a thousand little trips as I joined Twain on his journey.  

It is very, very long, but it was never tiresome, and there's a tartness to it that cuts through a lot of the length. And it did feel immediate too - even early Twain was a master at pinpointing just the things which make you feel like you're there with him and his fellow "pilgrims". 

2: A Book Set on a Plane, Train, or Cruise Ship