This is a bit of an odd book to categorise. Normally, I don't consider travel books to be memoirs, but Life on the Mississippi is very much a book of two halves. The first half is Twain's experiences as a very young man, when he was a pilot's apprentice on a Mississippi steamboat, learning how to traverse the river. It seems a mind-boggling job, as of course there was no radar or anything like that to help navigate the constantly shifting water course, so navigation needed a great deal of attention to detail and a prodigious lot of memorisation. That being said, Twain did not, of course, stay a steamboat pilot to the end of his days. That childhood dream achieved, he changed career and went on to do a number of other things - the most famous of which was writing. He did a few travel books, if I recall correctly, and that's the second half of the book. Over twenty years after he left off piloting the Mississippi steamboats, he returned to travel the river, basically to see what had changed.

Lots, is the answer. I think it's a bit more fascinating for him than me, seeing how things have got on, new buildings sprung up in towns and so forth. Don't get me wrong. It's a likeable enough read, with a few sparkling bits, but... I pride myself on being able to take an interest in most things, but Twain's love of the Mississippi, and his mania for trivia, tested my resolve in a number of places. I really don't care about tables of which boat made the fastest crossing where, and there's only so much description of life in small rivers towns that I can read without it all blurring together. I'm glad I read it, and I liked a great deal of it, but I'm also glad it's over. I probably wouldn't pick it up again.

I would like to see the river for myself one day, though.