Friending Huck: Making Mark Twain's Novel Universally Accessible

Photo by Jiaren Lau | Flickr

I have valued friends that don't read. That's what they tell me. They are digitally literate: they have deep social network available at a twitch of their fingers on their mobile phones and computers, they can find any information they need at the click of a button, but they "don't read" ...at least not literature.

That's why I want to create an online platform that makes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and the discussion surrounding it available and interesting to people who "don't read". Literature professors always encourage us to understand the discussion surrounding a work before we add our own voices to that discussion and I want to create a platform for the average person to have all that information at their fingertips in one place, not having to understand how library research works and the scholarly terms thrown around in critical articles in order to be able to read and participate in a meaningful conversation about the novel. I also hope this to be an excellent resource for those teaching about the novel in public and homeschool environments.

Must Reads

Have you ever gotten an email forward with a list of 100 books you should read or posted on your blog a long list of books from the Western Cannon and checked off the ones you have read? It seems these lists are becoming even more ubiquitous as social reading sites crop up all over the place. Sam McGrath's post for today got me thinking more about what we should read.

I clicked over to wikipedia's article about the Western Cannon. I didn't know there were so many different versions of it and these lists are not short. It is somewhat overwhelming. Take a look at St. John's reading college reading list. It's pretty amazing. Sam asked if we think we should try to read everything. The problem is, the cannon itself is controversial: should it include more works by women and other minority groups? Should we abandon it altogether? Is the notion of universal truths as represented in these works of fiction a load of nonsense in itself?