The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

I was initially going to read "Huck Finn," but I opened the first pages and "Huck" makes references to this book and I decided to go ahead and read Tom Sawyer first.
Like most people, I read Huck Finn in High School and remember very little of it. I remember a raft and floating around the Mississippi that's about it. But I thought I remembered the scene where Huck and Tom attend their own funeral as being from Huck Finn, but the scene is actually in Tom Sawyer. There might have been a movie they showed us in school that was a composite of both books, I'm not sure.
"Tom Sawyer" was actually a very good book, and though written for children it's better written than most contemporary books. The language is just as complex (if not more so) than today's literature because of the time it was written, 1876 when writing was a craft unlike today. I'm not going to write that everything was better back in "the good old days" of 1876 but just read this book and tell me that it's not much richer than the last 10 books written after 1980 you've read. Go on, try it.
"Tom Sawyer" brings one back to how boys got along quite well amongst themselves and makes one wonder how the impact our present "upbringing" of boys is hurting them in the long run. We're bringing boys up very differently than what's depicted in this book and I don't think that's a good thing. They had that book "The Dangerous Guide for Boys" or something a few years ago (followed quickly by The Dangerous Guide for Girls) about how to maybe put some of the "danger" back into being a boy that's missing from our feminized America. But read this book to see some real danger: smoking, murder (witnessed not committed), hidden treasure and raft stealing are all here.