Huck and Jim

by Anton Zuiker on October 29, 2025

Last week, Erin and I went to Duke to hear the author Percival Everett speak in Page Auditorium for the Weaver Memorial Lecture. Duke had sent a copy of Everett’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel James to each of the 1,700 incoming first-year students for the Common Experience Reading.

James is a retelling of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” the classic by Mark Twain, but from Jim’s perspective. Erin read the book in two days prior to the event; I’ll get to it soon (I’m reading The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, by Roland Allen, and will certainly blog about that soon.)

I was curious what I previously had blogged about Mark Twain, but I didn’t find anything in my 25-year archive. That’s funny, because I have two key memories related to Twain.

In 2009, we had been near Ithaca, New York, for a friend’s wedding in a state park under a tent (it poured buckets!) and before out flight out of Elmira next day (I remember sun), we visited Woodlawn Cemetery and the gravesite of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain). That year was a momentous year jobs, new projects, travel, a baby on the way), so I neglected to note the visit.

Even further back, when I was 10 years old, I spent many hours sifting through the stacks of used books my parents had collected for eventual donation to a prison. I mentioned those books in an early blog post, Bugs in the night:

To this day, I feel guilty about killing a spider in the basement of my family’s Idaho home—when the spider crawled toward me, I grabbed the first book from the pile before me and I squashed the creature. I turned the book over to see the title: Be Nice to Spiders.

Among the books and spiders was an anthology of Twain stories—Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn—and a young-reader version of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I distinctly remember reading the Yankee book a couple of times and enjoying the cleverness of the solar eclipse scene. I recall the other stories but I know I did not quite fully understanding them.

“The most subversive thing you can do is reading,” said Everett to the audience. “The second is being part of a book club.”

I’m in a science writers book club and I doubt we’ll be reading Twain anytime soon. But once I do read Jim, I’ll sit down with Erin to discuss the book.

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