The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Amazon Classics Edition)

I totally didn't know what to expect with this book after reading tom sawyer. but this is even better! It amazed me and surprised me about the adventures. A really good insight into what life was like back then, though author says there is no moral, it seems to have a lot of modern outlook to me, pointing out the unjust treatment of slaves, trickery of con men, strange ways of town folk, dangers of small minded villagers, and all the time centring around the innocence of boyhood, young male outlook, the inner teacher a boy can follow, the kindness and judgement he can learn to develop. OK, there is a repeated word, not used today, and offensive to people of African origin beginning with 'N', I daren't quote it here. However, it was used as in the original text and is correct in its historical usage. Be aware if passing this onto a child and decide for yourself how they may take on board or understand about this aspect in the language. but otherwise a great book. came on time.

Ashamed to say that I had reached my 60s before actually reading the whole of Huckleberry Finn (after having read Tom Sawyer, also for the first time, and you do need to have read that first). I hadn't realised how good a story-teller Mark Twain was, and if you haven't already done so I would thoroughly recommend them to you. OK, the world is rightly more politically correct now and you have to remember the culture that Twain was writing into, but even this is something of an eye-opener on the white-black divide in Mississippi at the time, but with a good deal of humour mixed in. The story requires you to suspend reality checks to some extent; for example, Huck is totally uneducated and in his early teens, but seems to have an excellent grasp of the geography along the river; perhaps he had just hitched rides on the riverboats and kept his ears open. Unlike 'Tom Sawyer', this book is written in first-person and with phonetic spelling; you just have to read with a Deep South accent! The loss of one star is for the Kindle version, which had an irritatingly large number of words joined together - e.g. 'I tellyouifI catchyoumeddlingwithhimagain' - which you become surprisingly quick at decoding but was a bit wearing. If you've not read it - now's your chance.

This is of the audible version of the book. I love Mark Twain and realize he is no longer politicaly correct. My problem with this version is two fold. 1. The first few seconds were in German. I'm not sure why, but it was short. 2. When the official narration came on, it is a female British reader. Her diction is excellent and she is a fine reader. Unfortunately, that is all the good I can say. She is reading with only the minimum inflection to her voice, and hearing a story of a boy living on the Mississippi river in the mid 1800s in a female British accent just doesn't make it. A female narrator would be fine, but have one that can speak with a country southern accent, not the queen's English.

I first read about Tom Sawyer, the Huck Finn when I was seven or eight years old, and have reread both several times. That's what makes a book a Classic, is that you can read them time after time, over a lifetime, and they will still set your imagination on fire, and, you will always find some little conceit, some word play, or opinion, that Twain has added to the story line. As with the differing speech patterns, dialects, etc, noted in the preface, Mr Clements writes with a precision, and a smooth flow, that one becomes so involved in the story, ends up reading Jim's, or Aunt Sally's neighbor's accents as if that's your very own lingo. As I said, I read about Huck and Tom, long before I ever heard of the Hardy Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, or any of the Fifties numerous Child's adventures. My first and second grade teachers have me good grades, besides notes on every report card, saying things like. " Herman doesn't like to participate in class, and seems to daydream a lot. Well, Duh, I was reading at a sixth-grade level before I ever heard of stupid " Dick and Jane", and their babyish buddy's.

I wonder if somewhere in the Great By and By Mr Clemons is having himself a little chuckle every time some English teacher assigns his tome to another class of befuddled students. Surely the man who created the least literate, most rebellious, and most happily ignorant character in American Lit would appreciate the irony. He might even crack wise at the serious sermonizers and pretentious pontificators lauding his deeply flawed novel as the prodigious. Of all people, Mark Twain would know a sham when he saw one. Even taken in the context of the day, this novel's glaring inadequacies and blunders are hard to miss. But then, he would also recognize the American-ness of the response, as well, the salesman's spiel, the overblown praise, the pumped up pomposity, the urgent, if insecure, need to apply superlatives. For, like his book, America has all of the same qualities, and in that regard, it is indeed The Greatest Most Perfectest American Novel Ever Written!