My Favourite Parts of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

My love affair with my Kobo continues.  Once I finished Then Again by Diane Keaton I jumped head first into The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. What kind of student of comedy could I call myself never having read any Twain? Now I finally have, and the kicker is it was FREE. So many great classics are free through e-readers. It's a brave new world, kids.


I love how Twain reminds us that childhood isn't all fun and games...sometimes it's just plain hard work. And more than a little weird.  Aunts never change either, for the record.  We're the same as we ever were.

These are my favourite parts:


“Oh come, now, you don’t mean to let on that you like it?” The brush continued to move. “Like it? Well I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?” That put the thing in a new light. Ben stopped nibbling his apple. Tom swept his brush daintily back and forth—stepped back to note the effect—added a touch here and there—criticized the effect again—Ben watching every move and getting more and more interested, more and more absorbed. Presently he said: “Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little.”


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Tom was a glittering hero once more—the pet of the old, the envy of the young. His name even went into immortal print, for the village paper magnified him. There were some that believed he would be President, yet, if he escaped hanging.


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Huck Finn’s wealth and the fact that he was now under the Widow Douglas’s protection introduced him into society—no, dragged him into it, hurled him into it—and his sufferings were almost more than he could bear. The widow’s servants kept him clean and neat, combed and brushed…. He had to eat with knife and fork; he had to use napkin, cup, and plate; he had to learn his book, he had to go to church; he had to talk so properly that speech was become insipid in his mouth; whithersoever he turned, the bars and shackles of civilization shut him in and bound him hand and foot.