The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Just fought sleep to finish The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. This was very interesting. I've always held a special place in my heart for Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, but I'd never actually read either story. I guess its the whole idea of the American frontier Peter Pan. As a matter of fact, they hold such a place in my heart that had things worked out differently for me in my personal life, I would definitely campaigned to have a son named Huckleberry Sawyer Adams. {For the record, my daughter would have been Mallory Guinevere Adams or Guinevere Mallory Adams [Until of course I had a department manager at work with the last name Guinn (cough, douchebag) which completely ruined that name for me anyway.]} I was really surprised at how little I knew about the story. I had assumed I knew the basic gest of it, but pretty much all I knew about the story was Huck Finn and a runaway slave named Jim took a raft down the river.

But I digress. Also, for this book, I tried out my Barnes and Noble Nook app for my Droid phone. It actually worked better than I thought it would. However, the fact that a Nook is larger than the screen on my phone meant that I had to turn the page usually three times to actually get to a new page. It seemed like I was constantly turning the page.

The most difficult thing about reading this book was the use of a certain word. I think everybody who has the foggiest clue about Huck Finn knows what word I'm speaking of. I know Twain used it for a definite purpose but seeing that word over and over was very off-putting. Living my whole life in Alabama, I've heard that word far more often than I care to.

On to the next item on the list. I did break down and order a book. This selection came from probably my best friend and absolutely my most trusted advisor Matthew Hodges. Its Amok by Stefan Zweig. All I know about it is that its only like 70 pages. At least it came as a collection of other stories, but still it doesn't add up to more than 130 pages. Here is the blurb on Zweig from the back cover of the book:

"Stefan Zweig, born in 1881 in Vienna, was a member of a well-to-do Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a novelist and translator, then as a biographer. Zwieg travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and enjoyed literary fame. His stories and novellas were collected in 1934. In the same year, with the rise of Nazism, he briefly moved to London, taking British citizenship. After a short period in New York he settled in Brazil, where in 1942 were found lying on their bed in an apparent double suicide."