What's up with Tom Sawyer?

I remember devouring Mark Twain short stories and loving Tom Sawyer when I was little. This time around, I'm having a difficult time getting interested in the text. I feel so disconnected from Tom's world. I simply cannot relate to a young boy who tricks his friends into whitewashing his fence, who tortures bugs during church, and who steals rafts and turns into a "pirate" with his best buds. My life is too different from his to relate on any level. It's not that I don't appreciate Twain's imagination or his writing style; I'm just not invested in the book.

I didn't have the same problem with either The Graveyard Book or The Trumpet of the Swan. It's not that my life parallels a boy who's growing up in a graveyard or a literate, musical swan, but somehow these books kept my interest far better than Tom Sawyer has.

As I stare at the pile of YA books on my desk, I can't help but wish that we were reading The Giver or The Phantom Tollbooth, both childhood favorites of mine. I remember themes in both of those that I believe will still be applicable to me today, ten years after my initial reading of the texts.

This class is teaching me that perspective really changes one's outlook on anything that person reads--for better or for worse!