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[actually using the edition downloadable from standardebooks.org/ebooks/mark-twain/the-adventures-of-tom-sawyer ]

I tried reading this when I was approximately Tom's age and knew almost nothing about US culture, and bounced pretty hard. I was curious to try again now that the cultural distance wouldn't be so alienating.

I am enjoying it much more this time, but I think the real variable is age. The cultural setting still feels so far removed from anything I know that I needed the first chapter explained to me; fortunately it hasn't been a barrier in the rest of the book, but it's still highly unfamiliar. But I remember hating the famed whitewashing a fence story as a kid, and this time I found it wryly amusing - I just think this is a book for adults about a kid, not a book for kids.

I'm about 2/3 of the way through and both the racism and the amount Twain condescends to his characters are grating. But he was also an excellent observer and writer; so far there's enough to keep me going while sometimes gritting my teeth or rolling my eyes at the author.

At the heart of this book, there's a good, simple ghost story in a creepy setting. It would work well as a short story, and Myfanwy Piper did a great job distilling that short story back out for the libretto of Britten's opera version. But the original text is so heavily larded with too many words--too many adjectives, just too much in general--as to ruin it for me. Some of this is the sheer wordiness, some is how slowly the story is drawn out, which was probably an artefact of having originally been published as a serial. But some is also how heavily the protagonist feels the need to imbue every step with Drama, to the point that when the ending comes it has no impact whatsoever because the piece has been blaring at fortississimo for an hour.

Seriously, the opera is a so much better telling of the same story.

How to review this without spoilers for things that it is definitely worth encountering at the speed they're written?

I found this a hard book to read, because so much of the plot is driven by the protagonist making decisions that are clearly bad in the moment they are made. I felt a bit like the stereotypical moviegoer wanting to shout "no, don't do it" at the screen. But I ultimately came to see it as a classic tragedy: a whole series of painful events driven by the hero's fatal flaw. And it is all aspects of the same flaw, and the flaw is one that's very recognisable looking around at society.

It's also a story of the right size for the novella format. Sometimes I get frustrated that novellas feel incomplete, rushing to an ending and/or leaving too few characters fleshed out. This one just felt tightly focussed.

And it has one of the best closing sentences of anything I've read, up there with The Dispossessed for how perfectly it recapitulates the whole story, and how little it will mean prior to having read the story.

#SFFBookClub

As it happens, this book was written by a good friend's brother. But it's also about a couple of questions close to my heart: what of the ideals of communism can be salvaged from the horrors of 20th century "Actually Existing Socialism" as practiced, and how can we be appropriately critical of those horrors without throwing out the baby with the bathwater?

It's perilous ground, and I've already found things to argue with in the first chapter. But he's a good writer who clearly knows the field deeply, and I am interested to see where he takes it.

I appreciated how much this book fills out the world and culture of its setting through individual characters' stories, without having to do a lot of Worldbuilding per se. I found each main character in some way relatable, and particularly enjoyed the way their initially disparate stories gradually get connected to each other. In the end I didn't find it quite as satisfying as the more tightly focussed stories of the first two books, but it's very nicely done and has a lot of very timely stuff to say about ways people care for each other or fail to, and about both emigration and immigration.