With biting satire of slavery, Twain's signature humor, Twain's best female character (the ex-slave Roxanna: 1/16th black, wonderfully colloquial, resourceful and clever) and even some of the earliest courtroom drama I’ve encountered, “Puddin’Head Wilson” has a lot to love. Hard to read because every page had some line or passage that I wanted to collect - in fact every chapter begins with a hilarious, insightful, and/or ironic entry from main character David "Puddin'head" Wilson. Every chapter!

As a writer, my favorite was from Chapter XI: "There are three infallible ways of pleasing an author, and the three form a rising scale of compliment: 1, to tell him you have read one of his books; 2, tell him you have read all of his books; 3, to ask him to let you read the manuscript of his forthcoming book. No. 1 admits you to his respect; No. 2 admits you to his admiration; No. 3 carries you clear into his heart."

This is a book that can given a surface read for pure enjoyment, but can also take some deeper inspection.

Of mild amusement, but also of interest to fellow writers, is the inclusion of "Those Extraordinary Twins" - a story that began as the main focus of the novel, but was eventually overtaken by other characters and their actions, and eventually excised into its semi-separate tale.

This is one of those variants on the Prince and the Pauper type tales, in which a young slave woman in the American almost-South (does Missouri count as the South? I've honestly no idea) swaps her baby with that of the man she is enslaved by. The two boys grow up into each other's place, but the story really has no interest in the white-child-turned-slave, it's all about the slave-turned-white-child, and I'm not sure how I feel about him being thoroughly a bad person. On the one hand, he's cosseted and spoilt by his vacuous purported relatives to an extent which would ruin any child, but on the other it smacks a little too much of the (unfounded, in this case) argument that nature is overcoming nurture. Which is of course bollocks, but which would be absolutely of a piece with the attitudes of the time... attitudes which Twain is admittedly skewering. The final line - which I won't spoil - is so pointed, so vicious and ridiculous at once that it is both the only line Twain could have ended this story on, and worth reading the entire book for. Which seems to give the impression that it's a bad book, now that I think of it, but it isn't. I genuinely liked it, but the sting in the tail is what really makes it.

You can tell that this was written at the end of his career. It's like he's so exhausted with life and humanity that he doesn't bother with fully developing any characters or themes, and so it's one long meandering story with occasional moments of brilliance. At times it feels like reading a stream of consciousness. I wish he had happened on this concept at an earlier point in his life when he had more energy and perhaps wasn't quite so jaded.

Sam, I know you needed the money, but I think you would have been better served by spending your time elsewhere.

Written in Twains witty style but with deep social commentary on race