Just Finished: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

First off, let me say up front that I understand Huck Finn's importance in the history of literature, and respect it as the achievement it is. Written in 1885, it was a "novel" in the modern (21st Century) sense of the word. It dealt with themes of coming of age, understaning morality, and coming to terms with slavery in America, a mere 20 years after slavery had ended; many, if not most people who read Huck Finn when it first came out had lived through the Civil War, and so the story was relatable on a very human level.

That being said, I didn't really like it. For all of its merits, it is on some level, the story of a redneck boy, an unfair racial stereotype and a couple con men. The con men subplot is resolved off the page, and there are significant portions of the book when I had no idea where Jim had gone. There were other parts that weren't clearly written, and I had no idea what was going on. Other parts tended to drag. The closer I got to the end, the more effort it took to finish it.

In the end, I'm glad I finally read it. If you are in high school now and reading this blog, I urge you to read it now. Get it over with. It's not that great, even though it is a classic.

UPDATE/December 23, 2010, 3:30 pm: I haven't decided what I will be reading next. Probably Iain Banks' Transition, but I haven't made a final decision yet.

Currently Reading: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

After finishing VALIS and The Wordy Shipmates, I have decided to commit to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Huck Finn is yet another in a long list of books I'm playing twenty years of catchup with. I was supposed to read it in high school (and college) but didn't. Time to make like Dr. Sam Beckett and put right what once went wrong.

Maybe I need to write up a list for the blog of everything that qualifies for my little project here.

Just finished (for the first time) in the last few years
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming*
1984 by George Orwell
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?*
The Man in the High Castle*

On the shelf, waiting to be read
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Crucible by Arthur Miller
The Sea Wolf by Jack London
A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
Nature's Metropolis by William Cronon

*Was never actually assigned to me in high school or college, but it did sit on my shelf for 20+ years.

I would include the following as well, but I had a lousy college professor whose style of teaching ruined these for me:

The Quiet American by Graham Greene
Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsen

I think the only books (or plays) I was assigned to read in high school that I actually read were Oedipus Rex, Animal Farm and Julius Caesar. Those all have something in common. Hint: they aren't exactly epics.

Yeah, I'm a fraud.

But I'm doing my best to make up for it.

Mark Twain

A very happy 175th birthday to Mr. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, otherwise known as Mark Twain. He of course needs no introduction.

I read the first eight chapters of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a senior in high school. I'm going to (start over and) finish it, probably sooner rather than later.

Happy Dodransbicentennial, American Icon!