Huckleberry Finn

    I had a less than enjoyable experience reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. I guess I just can't handle the way that they talk in the old south, because fifty pages into this book I was about ready rip my hair out. Books don't normally reduce me to that. But Huckleberry Finn did. I can understand how this would have been a breakthrough in writing and how the characters talk in the book was very realistic in its time. I'm sure in one hundred years the slang we use today will be hard to understand even though it was realistic for our time.  Not really being able to understand a good portion of this book definitely took away from the experience.
    Huckleberry Finn was, however a good main character. He is imperfect. He is not well educated and comes from a very poor family, but he is naturally intelligent and clever. He manages to get himself out of many difficult situations with inspired solutions. He struggles with what he should do about Jim, a runaway slave who becomes his companion, as the rules of white society don't quite seem to be fair. Somehow Jim is the lowest of the low, even though he might just as educated as a very, very poor white man. He seems to make his own rules as he goes along, and sometimes his decisions seem questionable. I suppose that's okay because he is a kid.
   Though Huck Finn was a good character, the book was generally hard to understand and I wouldn't suggest it to anyone who wasn't prepared to read and re-read the text again and again until it makes sense.