Tom Sawyer

1876, 1981 Bantam Classic edition
Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Original and purchase price unknown
Tattered paperback
B

There's not really anything I relate to in this book, unless it's how when you're a child $100 seems like a lot of money.  (Even more so in 1876 than in 1976.)  Yet, it's an enjoyable read, with lots of small-town adventure.  It is a bit odd that in one chapter there's a picnic and then in another Tom and Huckleberry Finn are trailing murderers, but maybe all adventures are about equal to a boy of that time and place.  I can't tell how old Tom is supposed to be.  He's described as a "small boy," which would make me guess 6 or 7, but he acts more like a preteen.  Wikipedia says Huck would be 12 or 13 in this book, so Tom must be about that.

Tom and Huck are so identified together, it's surprising to relearn that he's a minor character in the first half of the book, and Tom's best friend is Joe Harper, whom no one remembers.  (Maybe if there'd been an Adventures of Joe Harper.)  I remember preferring Huckleberry Finn to this novel, and we'll see if that holds true when I get up to the mid-1880s.

Twain was looking back 30 or 40 years at his own childhood, and idealizing it.  So, as Alfred Kazin notes in the afterword, there's a certain innocence in how, for instance, kissing is presented.  On this reading, I was surprised by the repeated "Sh't" when one boy is "impersonating a steamboat."  Twain was still enough of a mischievous boy to try to get away with that and, like Tom in his scrapes, he did.

After 700 years, I've finally completed one bookcase shelf.  I've gotten rid of the discrete C's and C-s, and the books that were falling apart so much that I don't think they'd stand up to another reading.  I'll buy replacements of Austen and the others, but not anytime soon.  As I told a friend in a dream last night, taking me to a bookstore right now is like trying to fix up somebody who's very happily married.  I've got enough to keep me busy and I'm not shopping around.