Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain (1883)

This is not so much as a book but as a series of the author's experiences and thoughts about the Mississippi river.  He originally published a bulk of the book as individual articles in The Atlantic magazine, and when you read it as a book, you notice right away that it really doesn't tell a story from front to back--or really in any kind of order.

The opening chapters are very technical, explaining in what for me was far too much detail how ships navigate up and down the river.  I quickly bored of the descriptions of ships, life on ships, jobs on ships, and the running of ships.  Enough about the boat already.

The thing I couldn't understand was that actually being on the Mississippi river is an incredibly peaceful and strangely moving experience.  That was somehow omitted from the book--and maybe you don't feel that when you are in charge of getting the boat from point A to point B without mishap.

 I spent 10 days one summer long ago on a steamship on the Mississippi that harkened back to the time of Twain.  Which meant that there was more mold than you might like in ones cabin, but otherwise the rooms were remarkably spacious (by boat cabin standards) and it was easy to fall into the slow but steady rhythm of the river.  The timing of my trip was flat out awful--my youngest son was at the end of a year of chemotherapy, and anyone who knows anyone who has gone through such a grueling regime knows that the end is the worst--the risk of infection is highest right before you end completely, and in his previous round of chemotherapy he had his only frightening admission for infection of his whole year plus of treatment.  So being stuck on a boat was not reassuring for me.  Then there was the fact that my eldest son was having his Bar Mitzvah--I wanted his life event to go well, and to be as unaffected by what we had all been going through as possible--which was going to be much more complicated by my being on a river boat for a week.  One of my friends was cooking at my house for his party while I was on this trip.  When I say the timing wasn't good, I am not exaggerating.  Yet despite all that, I loved the river and the time I spent on it that summer.  I felt like I got a glimpse of what held Twain's love for it.

The second half of the book is just wonderful, going through the towns that are on the river.   New Orleans is very recognizable today through Twain's eyes--it is funny how much it's present day character was present over a 100 years ago.  He talks about the Civil War and the fight for control of the river--which centered on Vicksburg, and the description of that sounds like a bygone era.  Since I live in Iowa, which has many river towns (Dubuque, Keokuk, Davenport,  and Burlington are described by Twain), I particularly enjoyed descriptions of towns which were a bigger part of the commerce of the state a century ago.  Overall, it is not so much a work of art but a tale of love by the author--one that resonated for me once I got past the mechanical details of the whole thing.