Read This!: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

By Mark Twain

Book challenge: Book mentioned in a movie

My all-time favorite movie is It's a Wonderful Life and if you'll recall, Clarence is reading Tom Sawyer. Having never read it, I decided, because I couldn't find anything to fit this challenge, to just do it.  Tom Sawyer is not a book I ever had much interest in because it was a story for boys (in my mind anyways).  I did read Huck Finn in school but that is all the Mark Twain I had under my belt.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is self-explanatory as to what it is about: the adventures of Tom Sawyer, a boy living in Missouri next to the Mississippi in the 1840s.    Tom is mischievous and smart which often leads to bad news.  He is in love with Becky Thatcher and likes to sport around with his friends like Huck Finn.

Although I swear I never read this book before, I had many moments of "knowing the story" when I was reading.  Maybe I watched it in a movie.  I will confess in grade school, we did read a part of this book in our reading class which I distinctly remember because it is how I learned the word melancholy but I KNOW I never read this as a whole entire book.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by the story.  I can see why I would never have wanted to read this in my younger days because it definitely was more of a boy story and I was more into The Secret Garden and Eight Cousins.  There were some moments where I did laugh out loud at unexpected humorous comments from the narrator and I have to confess I looked up what happens in Huck Finn on wikipedia because I couldn't remember and I wanted to learn the next part of the tale.

The best to come out of this is I can put another classic under my belt.