Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain

A book about running game, how women love a rogue, etc.

(I truly think this is the main intended message of the book)

A few small notes:

• people used to use "a body" as a pronoun, vaguely like people now use "[his/her/my/your] ass", and that's kinda interesting. I subsequently discovered people also used "a body" this way in 1750s England, and that was kinda interesting. (Tom Sawyer is published in 1876)
  
• there's something rich and rewarding about reading old works just to immerse in a world that you don't know much about and try to notice which things they did/didn't have and did/didn't take for granted. (E.g. the narrator mentions that matches had not been invented yet at the time when the book took place, small-town 1840s America -- I have no real sense when matches were invented, or what people did before that).
  
  I wish I had liner notes, there's so much I must have missed here. There was a plot point that hinged on how collars connected to shirts and how you took them on and off and sewed them back together, but I didn't really understand it. (I know, this being one of the most famous books ever, there's certainly a version out there with copious liner notes, but I'm too lazy to look for it)
  
• Per wikipedia, this was one of the first novels to be written on a typewriter -- that's kinda cool too.
  
• As it happens, soon after reading Tom Sawyer I started on A History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, by Henry Fielding, the most famous (I think) English novel of the 1700s. I couldn't help wondering if Tom Sawyer was inspired by Tom Jones, I feel like there must be something written already on whether Twain was inspired by Fielding, but it's surprisingly hard to google because "Tom Sawyer Tom Jones" just brings up stuff about Tom Sawyer -- not sure what the fancy name for this is but seems like it's a interesting problem in how search works?, I'd have to think more about what the clever solution would be.
  
  I also wonder if Tom Sawyer and Tom Jones are actually similar, or if I just haven't read many books from before 1900 so they would all seem similar to me due to commonalities that are actually common to literally all books of the time. I don't have a name for this either but it seems like a kind of common fallacy so if anyone knows a name for it I'd love to hear it.

Anyway. I only picked up Tom Jones because of Golden Hill, which I wrote about last week, but it's phenomenal and I'm deeply smitten with it and will have more to say on it in future.