The Innocents Abroad

What Hacker News says

1. bsderJul 2026
   Definitely Twain and it's not even close. Huckleberry Finn even has the episodic flavor of The Odyssey.

   For books you have "The Innocents Abroad", "Roughing It", "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", "A Tramp Abroad", "The Prince and the Pauper", "Life on the Mississippi", "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", and "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court".

   That's a hell of a lineup and includes a LOT of the flavor of the US as a young country.

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2. romanowsAug 2024
   And just 19 years later, Mark Twain published The Innocents Abroad, which I remember loving. I haven't looked at either in decades, but I'd bet that I'd still find The Scarlett Letter to be ponderous and boring and The Innocents Abroad to be an absolute delight in its subject matter, storytelling, and playful use of language.
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3. dougmwneNov 2018
   Actually, check out his book, "Innocents Abroad." It's a great travel native and lampoon of his cruising companions who manage to stay small-minded in a big world.
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4. wsc981Jan 2015
   I started reading (not yet finished) The Innocents Abroad from Mark Twain. The book was recommended in a previous thread on HN I think.

   It's an hilarious read and at the same time it's also interesting to read how people lived in Europe and the Middle East ~150 years ago.

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5. SomeoneApr 2024
   > there were so many mummies around from Egypt that they were used as fuel in some cases

   Likely, but it seems they aren’t 100% sure of that at the Encyclopædia Brittanica. https://www.britannica.com/list/7-surprising-uses-for-mummie...:

   “It was claimed by author Mark Twain that mummies had been used as fuel for locomotives. In his 1869 travel book called The Innocents Abroad, Twain describes the first railroad in Egypt. Because of the lack of trees and the price of coal, Twain claims that the Egyptians used mummies instead. He wrote, “[The fuel used] for the locomotive is composed of mummies three thousand years old, purchased by the ton or by the graveyard for that purpose.””

   Also, FTA: “we know the British imported mummies and bones from Egypt on an industrial scale”

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6. rocketnasaJun 2023
   > You touch on a major reason where a lot of American digital nomads fail, and that is that it takes A LOT to integrate into a foreign culture.

   I find they are disappointed because the wealthy are often the first to travel and live multiple-house nomad lifestyle. Which is nothing like being a nobody who has only average income. An actor traveling all over the world with a personal assistant and businesses arranging everything is who they hear about most as the nomads of the world. As they are the big sports stars, film stars, book authors, musicians - doing their show.

   But a lot of musicians and such will tell you that it is by no means easy to live on the road and to follow your own path.

   Back in the 1980's, George Lucas and Joseph Campbell really tried to make this knowledge clear to people. Campbell: "They've moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you've got to work out your life for yourself. Either you can take it or you can't. You don't have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience -- that is the hero's deed."

   Most people in 2023 wave around light sabers and have never bothered to study any of the things Lucas filmed about the mythology interpretation and human history of experiences.

   “One must travel, to learn. Every day, now, old Scriptural phrases that never possessed any significance for me before, take to themselves a meaning.” ― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

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