Can you recognize Twain as a young guy without his mustache? He looks like a snotty little PUNK!…no he doesn’t, any picture of anybody as a kid looks like a snotty little punk.

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I reread Tom Sawyer a couple years back just for the hell of it, and because I’d forgotten what all happens in it. If you’d asked me what mental image the book conjured up prior to the re-read, I’d have picked the fence-painting or Injun Joe…but now all I can think about is that the book opens with Tom pounding and bullying a smaller kid just for the hell of it! It’s a kid’s book, albeit I guess a readable one, so I don’t take it as seriously, whereas Huck Finn is about a kid but really for adults. Obviously you know that. But I had to read Huck Finn three or four times (I forget how many, but it was at least as many times as I had to read Frankenstein) for various classes (after reading it myself when I was about eight, but I didn’t really understand it at that age) so while it’s obviously the superior piece of literature I think there’s nothing left for me to plumb in its depths.

Cringey black mammy? I just got done reading piles of Margaret Mitchell’s excruciating attempts to write in slave dialect so that probably wouldn’t phase me one bit, having already heard Twain do that with Jim in HF anyways. Is it worse than the black mammy character in Tarzan The Ape Man? That’s a cringer.

So Twain wrote this during his suicidal Luddite pessimist period? Like Connecticut Yankee? That’s one bitter book, dude. I’d certainly rather read later Twain than early Twain at this point.