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    The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
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    The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
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    The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    Audiobook (abridged)2 hours

    The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

    Written by Mark Twain

    Narrated by Mike McShane

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    The classic tale of young scoundrel Huck Finn and runaway slave Jim’s breathtaking raft journey down the Mississippi. A masterpiece of American literature.

    'We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.'

    Huck Finn escapes from his alcoholic father by faking his own death and so begins his journey through the Deep South, seeking independence and freedom. On his travels, Huck meets an escaped slave, Jim, who is a wanted man, and together they journey down the Mississippi River. Raising the timeless and universal l issues of prejudice, bravery and hope, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was and still is considered the great American novel.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJun 15, 2005
    ISBN9780007218394
    Author

    Mark Twain

    Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, left school at age 12. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher, which furnished him with a wide knowledge of humanity and the perfect grasp of local customs and speech manifested in his writing. It wasn't until The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), that he was recognized by the literary establishment as one of the greatest writers America would ever produce. Toward the end of his life, plagued by personal tragedy and financial failure, Twain grew more and more cynical and pessimistic. Though his fame continued to widen--Yale and Oxford awarded him honorary degrees--he spent his last years in gloom and desperation, but he lives on in American letters as "the Lincoln of our literature."

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    Reviews for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

    4/5

    9,579 ratings234 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Wonderful voice for the Finn character. Excellent setting and world building. The racism is a little hard to take.
    • 5/5
      Mark Twain wears well, I think. I first read Huck Finn in college, which I think is the appropriate place for its introduction -- not grade school, as seems to be the norm. You need to be able to apply historical context to the story, to grasp Twain's sense of irony and satire, as well as his political motivations. You also need patience, as there is dialect and regionalisms in this book. It was a first in that regard. I recently acquired a copy for my library, and I started reading it again while my toddler played outside on a sunny afternoon. It wasn't long before I was swept away into Huck Finn's world. Twain has a gift for telling a good story while doing a lot more at the same time. His famous introduction cautions against finding a motive, moral or plot in this story, but how can you help it?
    • 2/5
      I got the feeling that I was missing a lot reading this book in English, like it had a lot more going on in Russian that didn't translate well.
    • 2/5
      Hernieuwde kennismaking met Tom Sawyer. Monoloog in de ik-persoon, gebrekkige syntaxis, monotone ondertoonTom sleept HF mee naar een bende rovers en moordenaars, maar het is allemaal maar spel. Het kon me echt niet boeien
    • 5/5
      matters appear hysterical on goodreads these days. Ripples of concern often appear daunting to the literate, cushioned by their e-devices and their caffienated trips to dusty book stores; why, the first appearence of crossed words often sounds like the goddamn apocalypse. Well, it can anyway. I find people are taking all of this way too seriously.

      I had a rough day at work. It is again hot as hell outside and I just wanted to come home and listen to chamber music and read Gaddis until my wife comes home. Seldom are matters that simple. It is within these instances of discord that I think about Pnin. I love him and the maestro's creation depicting such. I situate the novel along with Mary and The Gift in my personal sweet cell of Nabokov, insulated well away from Lolita and Ada, perhaps drawing strength from Vladimir's book on Gogol, though certainly not his letters with Bunny Wilson. It is rare that I can think about Pnin washing dishes and not tear up. I suppose I'll survive this day as well.
    • 5/5
      I read "Huckleberry Finn" in high school. In the intervening years, whenever I would hear that this book was being challenged or censored or banned from school districts, I would inevitably scoff. How could people be so closed-minded, I would think to myself, as to overlook the redeeming values of this text, one that has proven so accessible to students over the last century as a portrait of the evils of slavery, just because of the offensive nature of one historically-accurate word used within it.I've doubled in age since I first picked up the book, and just finished reading it again. And here's what I didn't remember: This book is harsh. Huck Finn isn't an abolitionist, just an opportunist who won't feel too bad if he accidentally gets taken for one. While he struggles to reconcile Jim's kindnesses towards him with everything he has been taught about slaves as property, and ultimately helps Jim to escape, he doesn't exactly do it for all the right reasons. And while the book is a satire of the time and place about which it was written, it is still the story of a black man filtered through a white person's perspective. Over and over, Huck has adventures while Jim is hiding in the swamp, or in costume in a wigwam, or locked up in a shed. If you were to tell the story from Jim's perspective, it would involve a lot of hiding and waiting. Our collective memory as a society is somewhat inaccurate; this is not the story of how Huck helps free Jim, but of how Jim helps free the mind and morality of Huck. Seeing the book now, I would question whether high schoolers have the necessary life experience and mentality to get this perspective out of the narrative. But for older readers, the book is worth a second look.The Barnes and Noble edition contains an introduction and notes by Robert G. O'Meally. The first half of the introduction offers insightful critical perspectives, but the second half veers too specifically into O'Meally's own personal academic interests, casting the novel as a precursor to the Blues tradition. The notes, also, can be irritating to educated readers, as they clearly presuppose younger readers with a less developed vocabulary and critical eye. While the edition is still an excellent buy with its attractive binding and affordable price, you might want to ignore the annotations unless you are one of the teenagers in the intended audience for them.
    • 4/5
      Not near as good a book as Tom Sawyer - but it was still good to revisit this book after all these years ...
    • 5/5
      I guess this is the summer of reading classic books. People already know the story from all of the various movies and Wishbone episodes. So I won't dwell on the plot too much. There's intrigue and secret pacts and rafts and steamboats and scams. Huck always seems to find the craziest events on the Mississippi.

      The best part of this is that it's written in various dialects. Huck's narrator voice is at least easy enough to understand, but lots of times I found myself reading things aloud to even figure out what some other character was saying. It really gives you a feel for the time period, more than any description would. I feel like I have a better understanding of the South now.

      I can see why people don't want this to be read in present-day schools, or prefer to read Tom Sawyer's adventures instead. Everyone says the n-word ALL THE TIME. I get it that it was the culture, that it is a historical piece, but it would make reading aloud in class quite difficult. This book has an undercurrent of racism and morality that is definitely more thought-providing my though.
    • 3/5
      Re-reading since high school. Good classic!
    • 3/5
      Check. That's how I feel about this book -- I've read it now, so can cross it off the list.Not sure why I found this one hard going compared to Tom Sawyer. I had expected them to be about the same in terms of difficulty, but Huck Finn has so many plot twists -- might I even dare suggest it sags in the middle? Were huge coincidences more accepted in fiction back in the day, or were huge coincidences actually more likely in a smaller population? I'm talking about the coincidence of Huck meeting up with Jim, and the even bigger coincidence later of Huck turning up at Tom Sawyer's auntie and uncle's house. Then there's the coincidence of meeting up with a whole string of baddies. Were there really that many bad people around to be met?I don't know. All of this is background noise, to a story written by a man with progressive politics. Now I really don't understand all that fuss about the frequent use of 'nigger'. Better instead to turn our aggravation towards stories such as Dead Wood, in which the language is all wrong for the time period. Nothing wrong with 'fuck', but no one talked like that back then, so why insert it? If the word 'nigger' was the word for Huck Finn's time period, then we are obliged to use it. If I never read this as a kid I can see why, despite its always adorning our bookshelves -- the phonetically reproduced dialogue is quite tough to understand for a child of the antipodes. Then there's the different word usage. Not sure I would've known enough about American history or what 'vittles' meant. Honestly, I loved Little House On The Prairie but at no stage did I have an education on how white people entered the American West. Likewise, nothing was ever said at school about American slavery. So I guess it's no wonder I only just got around to reading books like this.
    • 5/5
      I loved this book. It is exactly what I look for in a book, a great adventure and story. It moves at a good pace and doesn't get caught up in detail of a rock or the weather. The language and writing can be difficult at times to sit through but you get used to it and soon you don't even think about it. A great read
    • 5/5
      "Huckleberry Finn" is set in Missouri in the 1830's and it is true to its time. The narrator is a 13 year old, semi-literate boy who refers to blacks by the N-word because he has never heard them called anything else. He's been brought up to see blacks as slaves, as property, as something less than human. He gets to know Jim on their flight to freedom (Jim escaping slavery and Huck escaping his drunken, abusive father), and is transformed. Huck realizes that Jim is just as human as he is, a loving father who misses his children, a warm, sensitive, generous, compassionate individual. Huck's epiphany arrives when he has to make a decision whether or not to rescue Jim when he is captured and held for return to slavery. In the culture he was born into, stealing a slave is the lowest of crimes and the perpetrator is condemned to eternal damnation.
    • 5/5
      Took me a while to chew through this one... its longer than I remembered from high school! I'm glad I read it again, however, and am looking forward to the next title in my classics challenge!
    • 5/5
      This was a book club selection. I had only read excerpts of this book in high school and college, so I am glad I had the opportunity to read the whole book. Twain's writing in the dialect of the day enhances the enjoyment of this book.
    • 4/5
      The boy nobody wants finds courage and destiny. An adventure.
    • 5/5
      This is one of those classic novels that I truly enjoyed despite having to read it for school. Huck Finn is a fun, light-hearted character who embarks a grand adventure. There is lots of action. Twain's use of dialect for the characters puts a reader into the time, though it does demand more carefulk reading to catch all the nuances. Overall, I recommend this to ALL readers. Just a a good book.
    • 5/5
      Fantastic somewhat comical adventures of boy who goes off with an escaped slave on a raft. Pokes fun at mankind. This was my second reading of it.
    • 3/5
      Yeah, I wasn't terribly impressed by this book. It started out good enough, but by the middle it was just like pulling teeth. All that stuff with the Duke and the King and all that stupid stuff just bored me tears. It was all I could do to read ten pages a night. And then I absolutely hated the end of it, it just seemed so stupid, and entirely heartless to make such a game of helping a man escape from slavery. I didn't find it funny at all...rather I found it pretty disgusting.

      And even though I knew that the language was accurate according to the dialect of the time, I'm a 21st century girl, and couldn't help but feel disgusted and actually offended by the attitudes and language. It's just constant, and Twain entirely embraces just about every negative stereotype possible to use in this book. I can completely understand why this book has been banned, even if the greater themes of it are not racist at all. I think it's just one of those books that it's hard to see past what's on the surface, especially by those of us raised to the greater sensitivity of the 21st century.
    • 3/5
      Things I liked:

      The characters voice and train of thought frequently made me smile. The way his mind came up against big moral issues like slavery and murder and things like that were provocative, making me wonder about my own rational for strongly held beliefs.

      Things I thought could be improved:

      The section at the end when Tom Sawyer was doing all manner of ridiculous rituals as part of the attempt to free Jim I thought stretched credibility of Huck or Jim going along with him. Even with the reveal at the end that Jim was really free anyway I found it tiresome after a while. While I don't mind the idea of Tom trying to add some romance to the escape, I think it definitely could be have been edited down to about a third of what it was.

      Highlight: When Jim finds Huck again after being lost on the raft. Huck plays a trick on him to convince him it was all a dream. Jim falls for it but then catches on and shames Huck for playing with his emotions. That made both the character of Jim and Huck sing for me.
    • 3/5
      Might want to read it again sometime. Took me a while to get into it, but by the last third I was hooked.
    • 5/5
      Very funny, as well as very interesting.

      Hard to think of a better book with a teenage main character - Treasure Island, perhaps ?
    • 2/5
      Dissected this one for English class. Sometimes, discussion takes all the charm out of a book. So do angry yet subtle attacks at Romanticism.
    • 4/5
      The way the language is portrayed, the stylized dialogues, and the underlying condemnation of slavery makes this Twain classic one that everyone should read. In some ways, Twain reminds me of Charles Dickens...Some scenes, particularly towards the end with Tom seem to stretch on and on, long after the humor is gone. Still this novel is an immovable object in American Lit. You just have to read it.
    • 5/5
      Wonderful language, wonderful dialog, full of my childhood.
    • 5/5
      I love, love, love this book. The humor, the sincerity, the narrative voice. Exceptional. That being said, I struggled with that fifth star. Something about the word "nigger," no matter how eloquent and well-executed its context, leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. Intellectually, though, I can appreciate some of what Twain is doing, here. He doesn't patronize his reader by creating in Huck Finn an overly sympathetic character infused with the author's own socio-political pathos. Huck isn't the poster-child for abolitionist propaganda, but a still-burgeoning personality trying to define its own moral good. In fact, it is simply brilliant that Twain ironically reverses Huck's ethical conflict, depicting his reluctance to STEAL a slave from slavery because theft is a sin, and his ultimate decision to toss himself entirely into "wickedness." We love Huck precisely because he wants so badly to do the right thing, whatever that might be.

      The scene in which Jim laments his estranged wife and children is particularly moving, for Twain takes care to depict his humanity, though Huck himself is ambivalent about his friend's grief; that's very clever writing.

      Michiko Kakutani wrote a very interesting piece in the New York Times about some politically correct editions of the text; the word "nigger" has been replaced with something more palatable for contemporary readers, but with all due respect, completely unrealistic for the novel's characters. Kakutani explains that "'Huckleberry Finn' actually stands as a powerful indictment of slavery (with Nigger Jim its most noble character)" and that censoring the original removes the possibility "of using its contested language as an opportunity to explore the painful complexities of race relations in this country. To censor or redact books on school reading lists is a form of denial: shutting the door on harsh historical realities — whitewashing them or pretending they do not exist." I am a fierce opponent of censorship and could not agree more. Hence, that inexorable little fifth star.
    • 3/5
      Eh. It's certainly entertaining. It's undeniably a classic. I'm not sure if I had any major lessons learned from it. Not super high on my list of 'must read' titles.
    • 5/5
      I "reread" this book on audio, narrated by Elijah Wood.

      I haven't read this since high school and I thought it would be fun to listen to, and it was. Elijah's voices were true to the story, and brought an additional level to the depth of this tale.

      I'm happy to report that this book held up to my memory of it, and then surpassed it.
    • 3/5
      Such a hard book to review. Great storytelling, satire, America, funny, etc. The final saga of Jim escaping just makes me hate Tom Sawyer, though.
    • 4/5
      I first read this book in elementary school. Reading it again as an adult has allowed me to appreciate it on a new level.

      As Twain states at the start of the book, "persons attempting to find a plot in [this book] will be shot." It's simply a compilation of a number of adventures that Finn has with his friend Jim, who happens to be an escaped slave, as they travel down the Mississippi River. Jim is seeking his freedom and Huck is along for the ride.

      Each vignette presents us with a sample of Twain's sense of satire and the outlandish. He portrays caricature stereotypes of his time, for example, the feuding families of the Appalachian regions, pervasive racism and a constant clash between religion and superstition. The tales also become increasingly extravagant and show Huck's skill in twisting truth to manipulate others.

      What strikes the modern reader most is the conflicted morality of the narrative. While Huck doesn't think twice about outright lying, cheating and defrauding others, he believes he'll go to hell because he's helping a slave escape to freedom. He acknowledges that Jim is a good and caring man, yet he still treats him as something less than fully human. Parts of the dialogue were, frankly, very difficult to read.

      This novel needs to be read with the historical framework within which it was written in mind. Also, this particular volume is uncensored so it makes liberal use of "the N word" with the deepest of derogatory intent. While thought provoking, this book should be discussed with young readers so they understand the racist context.
    • 5/5
      I love this story but not without a train-load of reservations. I love it because of the place it had in my life. It was my first indication that my 1980's education, in which slavery was made to sound something like working for room and board, might not be telling the whole story. It was my introduction to the concept of how ready we are to dehumanize those outside of our socially defined groups. It was the reason I started reading slave narratives and other nonfiction on the topic. It taught me that when you find yourself conflicted, you should choose your principles over the dictates of society. Nevertheless, I cannot help but ask, how would this story feel if I lived in a black body?When I read it, I see an adventurous coming-of-age story that subtly and slowly reveals how white folks viewed slaves as non-human, as on par with animals. Animals, I might add, being held in far less esteem then than now. It speaks to the absurdity of any group's claims to moral superiority. It is a mirror of the racism of that time, which so many still deny. Huck's arc reflects the conflict which can arise between social mores and personal ethics. However, how would this book read to me if I were African American? When listening to the audio, I winced to hear that word (you know the one). In reading the text version, I was able to skim over it more easily, but in audio form, there it was, loud and clear. With this story, I have always been struck by the treatment that the white people in it accepted as fine for black people. In audio form, it took on even greater horror. To hear a thing said aloud, in some ways, makes it more concrete. While there is no doubt that Jim is readily the kindest and most moral character in the book, how would it feel to me, were I to be black, that he, utterly devoid of education and extremely superstitious, was the only representation of people who looked like me?And how would this book sound to me if I were Native American? For all that Twain seems to grasp the horror of how blacks were treated in this country at that time, the racist comments about indigenous people are far more casual and have no indication of being satirical.Regarding it being taught in high school, I think it's long past time that black voices were used to tell black stories. Perhaps it's time for this book to be left for folks to discover, or not, on their own.