When Eric Rosenfield asked me to take part in the Wold Newton Reading Extravaganza at Readercon, in which I was invited to take the stage for four minutes while accompanied by appropriate music from Brian Francis Slattery and his band, my immediate thought wasn’t to read any of my own writing.

No, what popped into my head was Mark Twain’s “The War Prayer,” which he refrained from publishing during his lifetime, and which I’d last read aloud during high school to protest the Vietnam War. It was short, it allowed for histrionics … plus Twain was this year’s Readercon Memorial Guest of Honor.

The other brave souls who took part in what I hope will now be an annual Readercon event were Myke Cole, Jeffrey Ford, Theodora Goss, John Kessel, and Matthew Cheney. The whole thing is well worth half an hour of your time, but if you only have a few minutes, you can see my abridged version of “The War Prayer” from 10:38 to 15:17.

You’ll note I introduced my reading by saying I was about to present an “abridged” version of that famous story. That’s because even though the tale is short, it would still have taken more than six minutes to read, and I didn’t want to get gonged off the stage before I reached the moral.

I hope Twain will forgive me!