(Pictured above: a quick sketch of Huck Finn rafting downriver with his pal Nacho Jim)

Recently, I had downloaded the Kobo e-book reader for iPhone. I won’t lie – I downloaded Kobo because I’m trying to raise enough CheckPoints for a $25 gift card to Home Depot, and you can get coins to win points for downloading featured apps. (If you start doing CheckPoints, totally enter reference code StephC and you’ll get some bonus points. I’m done selling you on stuff now I promise.) Kobo was a featured app, and as I was clicking through it I found the free books in the virtual library that come with the app. All 5 free books are classics, and one of those was The Adventures of Huck Finn. So I figured I’d give the e-reader thing a whirl for this book report.

Here’s what I give thumbs up to with an e-reader on your phone. Your book is always with you, which is nice. You wouldn’t believe how fast you can get through a book when you have easy access to it everywhere. Like if you have an extra five minutes while you’re waiting for something, you can get through a few more pages. It’s awesome. I’ve been trying to read The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson for months and am only about halfway through it because it’s just not as easy to keep with me all the time.

The downside to Kobo? If you spend any significant amount of time reading on your phone, you are gonna burn through your battery pretty quick. Normally, at the end of the day when I put my phone on the charger it’s nowhere near close to dead. On days where I read a lot, that battery can be pretty close to zero by 9pm. So anyways! Puttin that out there. I’m definitely going to do more reading on Kobo in the future, but I’ll also make sure I keep that phone charger convenient! And without further ado, let’s take a trip down the river with Huck Finn.

Hearts and Laserbeams Book Report: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Ok first things first. Mark Twain, you sir need to learn a little bit about racially offensive words. There are lots of other N words you could’ve used instead of THAT one, and I aim to prove it with this blog post.

I realized shortly after I started reading this book that I should’ve read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer before this one… it opens up pretty much telling you that. But Tom Sawyer wasn’t available for free in my Kobo library, so I told Tom to suck it and moved on. It starts out saying how Huck and Tom got a bunch of money from their escapades in that book, and they were living in houses now and being all respectable-like going to school and all that. Which apparently is new for them. Huck’s all uncomfortable with it, but is trying to be good. He’s friends with a nacho named Jim that lives at the house, and that plays into the story later.

Huck’s dad is a dirtbag, and used to beat him and this that and the other thing, and he shows up because he knows Huck came into some money and he wants a piece of it. Or all of it. You know, whatever. Huck caught wind his dad was in town, and quickly hid it by giving it to the judge as a present basically. The dad was ticked off about it, and swore he’d get his hands on it. So he takes Huck to a shack to live with him, and he’s a drunk and basically makes Huck’s life a living heck.

Huck’s had enough and decided to fake his death to get out of there. He waits til his dad’s gone one night and he does this whole nasty carnagey murder scene at the house involving lots of pigs blood (I think this was his nod to the movie Carrie), and he takes off down the Mississippi river in a canoe.

How did he hook back up with Nasturtium Jim on his travels, I forget… but somewhere along the line, this kid finds Noselame Jim. Nailbiting Jim ran away from home right around the same time as Huck, because he heard his owner Aunt Sally talking about selling him down the river. And he was like OH HELL NO and he left. So he was on the lam, too. Huck gets an update of what’s been going on in town since he faked his death from Naked Jim – I guess his dad was the prime suspect in the “murder”, but then they also suspected Nestegg Jim because he disappeared at the same time Huck did. Huck and Nametag Jim team up for a slew of river-travelling adventures, and I have to say I’m totally into stories like this, basically a road trip with more water… I love it.

Huck and NannyMcPhee Jim are on the river, lots of random stuff happens as they try to get to a city where Jim can go free, and they end up accidentally passing it. On their travels, they do meet a couple of shysters that basically just wanna go out and shyster the heck out of everyone they come across. They try to convice Huck and Ninja Jim that they’re a King and a Duke, and Huck sees through it but Noodle Jim sorta believes them. They’re basically just full of crap and cause all kinds of problems for Huck and Needle Jim with their shenanigans.

Their biggest sham is a show they put on in a town called The Royal Nonesuch. I read Huck Finn once when I was a kid, and the description of this show is the ONLY thing I remember about the entire book. The show is one of the shyster dudes runnin around on the stage naked with stipes of paint on him. Which is totally scandalous to read about when you’re like 11. Maybe not the best of book choices. Huh.

Finally, Huck and Nannerpuss Jim get rid of the two other dudes, and they end up at another house separate but together. Like they had gotten separated because of a storm or something, so Huck went into a town looking for Nodule Jim and finds out a “runaway nun” had been captured by a family that was going to return him to the rightful owner. Huck goes to the house, and it turns out the family is waiting for their nephew to come visit. Since this is in the days before the internets, they have no idea what the kid looks like so Huck tells them he’s that kid they’re waiting for. As time goes on, and he finds out the runaway nancy they’re holding is indeed Nebula Jim, he also finds out the kid they’re waiting for is none other than Tom Sawyer. He’s able to catch up with Tom as his friend is arriving to let him know he’s been posing as Tom for a bit, can the real Tom play along? To which he absolutely agrees.

At this point, Huck’s already been working on plans to bust Nectarine Jim out of the shed the family has him locked up in, and Tom agrees to help with the escape plans. The comedy comes in when the two boys are surveying the setup at the shed. Huck says hey why don’t we go through this window here, and boom we’re done? But Tom is all wrapped up in books he’s read about prison breaks, and he insists the right way to do it is to follow that stuff. Meaning Numchucks Jim should tunnel out of there, scrawl some stuff on the walls about how long he’d been imprisoned, try to grow a flower in the dark corner of the shed, try to play music to make friends with the spiders and rats and snakes in the shed… All of it is ridiculously complicated to the point where things that are nice and easy are effed with so they’re much much more difficult to deal with. There weren’t any critters to play music to in the shed, so Tom and Huck caught a bunch of snakes, etc to eff with Neighbor Jim. Things like that. Where you’re almost smacking your head at the end of it all saying “SWEET LORD JUST BUST HIM OUT ALREADY.”

At the end of it all, they do bust him out, but not before making things pretty uncomfortable at the house, and the actual escape gets a little hairy, ending with Tom getting shot. You’re almost like “yeah dude you should’ve just slipped him out the window and bailed, right?” when you read that, but still it’s a kid so you can’t be TOTALLY jerky about it. Huck ends up stuck back at the house, Neoclassical Jim ends up back in the shed chained up this time. And it looks like everything is going to fall apart.

But then, Tom’s Aunt Polly shows up. WHAT! Turns out she’s looking to see what hijinks Tom’s gotten into, because she tried to write to her sister and hadn’t gotten any replies. So everything is revealed that Huck is Huck, Tom is Tom, and Newspaper Jim is free. WHAT?!?! He’s pretty much been free the whole story and didn’t know it – Aunt Sally had felt bad about wanting to sell him, and so on her deathbed she set him free. SO – all this trouble everyone went to to keep him hidden because he was a runaway slave, and all the trouble Tom put everyone through to bust him out of the shed at the end of the story, just a big ol unneccessary waste of time.

Tom talks about how he knew Nickname Jim was free, and that his plan was to bust him out, take him on a great adventure to the end of the Mississippi, and then tell him he was a free man and bring him home, paying him for his time and trouble. Which is kind of awesome.

But also kind of a jerk move.

The end of the book is pretty abrupt, like you’re going along hearing this story, and it’s told from Huck’s point of view, and then it just stops. Like the end of that movie The Aviator. Huck says something about how writing a book is hard and he’s not gonna do it ever again, and the end. Way to go kid. Get tested for ADD.

I liked Huck Finn overall. Lots of descriptions about travels along the Mississippi, and the freedom that came with it for two guys that didn’t feel very free at all in the lives they left behind. (deep, right?) Lots of social commentary about how being on one’s own on the river with a good friend beats the heck out of being stuck in society where rules and regulations hamper a lot of freedoms. You should read it. The end. (How’s that for an abrupt ending?)

Ratings:

Hearts: 4 Twain loses a point here for language. I know the guy’s dead, and it was how they talked at the time. But come on dude, fire up your Delorian and use them 88.8 Gigawatts to blast to the past, and maybe take out at least 60% of the n words. It’s a little much. Also, more description of the dude running around nekkid, please. Thanks.

Farts: 1 Overall this book was pretty strong. Liked it. A lot. The End.

And now for some extra credit – visit this blog post by my buddy Paul, where he caught a chunk of my karaokeing Tina Turner’s “Rollin on the River” during our recent trip to Savannah. It’s fitting.