#21 - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

After this one, I am hitting the pause button. After 21 books, 5 of which were in the past two weeks, and the last 6 of which are about Americana, I am taking a breather. Not going on hiatus, or any other more indefinite time span, but a break. The Snooze button, if you will. After going on a reading spree followed by a writing spree like that, I am not going to go after the next work, The Divine Comedy, without at least somewhat of a recuperated mindset. These reviews have been shorter, partly because it's been 2 weeks since I've read the earlier ones, and partly because there wasn't all that much to say. There were some neat parts of books like Scarlet Letter and Our Town, sure, but in the end, nothing stood out. They didn't have the author or edition intrigue that books like Ulysses and On The Road had, and some of them just weren't that phenomenal. I will get back to everything soon, and I certainly hope to complete a pile more vlog entries, but as for reading and reviewing, if I complete two more for the summer, I will be contented.

Now, for the final book of my camp and my Americana readings, we return to Mark Twain and his other classic, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Tom Sawyer was the first to Huck Finn as the sequel, and the characters are shared between the two. However, both look at different themes and view things in different lights. Huck Finn was a legitimate adventure story, travelling through states and finding gunmen and all sorts of real escapades. Tom Sawyer, on the other hand, was a boy having fun in his town. While there were hijinks, they were on a smaller scale. The criminals became hooligans instead of cold-blooded killers (although Injun Joe comes close), and the whole thing read like a Hardy Boys novel instead of a adventure story. But in that Tom Sawyer brought a different flair. It was light, and fun, and playful. His pranks, like the whitewashed fence, are some of the best-remembered in American lore. The entire book presents itself as an ode to the joys of being young, the American Dream for kids - to be free and free-spirited.

Mark Twain inserted his politics into both Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. In Huck Finn, he deals with racism and prejudice, using Jim as the focal point. In Tom Sawyer, he throws in arguments for a bunch of different ideals. One of those was the idea that "People want what they cannot have", which is the moral of the whitewashing scene. He also deals with the idea of young love, in what was one of the most consistently amusing subplots of the novel. Becky Thatcher and Tom Sawyer see each other once at Sunday school, and once when Tom is walking by her house, and those instances alone result in Tom falling madly in love with her (and incidentally forgetting about his PRIOR fiancee and love in the process). This followed by their engagement, first kiss and fights (in that order) are equal parts hilarious and painfully true. As a summertime read, Tom Sawyer was wonderfully light and frothy. To sit in a hammock with bare feet in the grass reading it felt so right that I couldn't help but smile. However, the childishness of it made it rank below Huck Finn in my estimation, but as an excellent book, it still receives:

8/10