The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn… so they say this is a top read of all-time.  Ernest Hemingway declared, "All modern American literature comes from Huck Finn,” and hailed it as "the best book we've had."  I do slightly remember reading the book way back in the day.  Somewhat hard to keep attention to this classic.  The language was appropriate in having the reader go back to the day and to the area where this happened.   I don’t begin to understand the South and why slavery was important, no idea - everything about it is bad.  I happened to hear a keynote while away at my conference in the great city of Austin, sorry one last rip on it, by Bertice Berry – wow was she good.  Her point was maybe we should be reading more books about abolitionist and less about slavery.  This story would be ok to Beatrice as it illustrates support of abolitionist of sorts.  The intricacies of Huck and his decision making in committing to Jim, the slave, was admirable and hard to find, I’m sure, when all seems against you.  The story line “interruption” of the Duke and the King added little to the story for me.  While this certainly was the journey genre I tend to really enjoy, between the language and the extraneous storylines, not a great read and certainly not an all-timer for me.  Bring me Shakespeare’s Hamlet or even Dante’s Inferno.  It was hard to connect with that 1840’s – 1850’s storyline.  Thank god I was not born during that time.