True Grit

In a preface to one of his editions of Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury bemoaned the tendency of schoolbook anthology editors to "shorten" stories by censoring all the interesting authorial asides.  This is a crime, said Bradbury, because, "let's face it, digression is the soul of wit.  Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet and what stays is dry bones.  Laurence Sterne said it once: 'Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine of reading!'"

I loved the book True Grit.  I'd like to see one of the films that has been based on it, but I doubt either one can capture the best part of the book, which is the digressions.

Like To Kill a Mockingbird, True Grit is narrated by an adult female, looking back on events of her childhood.  The comedy in True Grit is all in the narrator's asides.  A never-married, wealthy, irascible, curmudgeon (incontestably the character with the most grit), she is far more exorcised over her modern political and religious and social opinions, than by anything happening in her harrowing memoir of travelling with a Federal Marshall, Rooster Cogburn, and a vain Texas Ranger, to find and capture the man who killed her father.  Just an incredible book.