Look, I've been teaching this book for twenty years. Twenty years of explaining to teenagers why a novel written in dialect about a boy and a runaway slave floating down the Mississippi still matters. And honestly? I thought I knew this book inside and out.
I was wrong.
Listening to Mark F. Smith's narration while walking the lakefront last week - Denise had already peeled off to grab coffee, leaving me alone with Huck and Jim and the November wind off Lake Michigan - I caught myself actually laughing out loud. Not the polite chuckle of recognition you give a familiar joke. Real laughter. The kind that makes joggers look at you funny.
What Twain Was Really Doing
Here's the thing about Huckleberry Finn that I don't think I fully appreciated until I heard it spoken aloud: Twain wasn't just writing a novel. He was transcribing a voice. Huck's voice. That rambling, half-educated, deeply moral voice of a boy who doesn't know he's moral - who thinks he's doing wrong by helping Jim escape and does it anyway.
When you read it on the page, you process it. When you hear it? You feel it.
Smith gets this. His Huck isn't a caricature of a Southern boy - he's got this earnest, slightly confused quality that nails the character. The way Huck reasons through his moral dilemmas, convincing himself he's wicked for not turning Jim in, while the listener knows he's actually becoming a better person than anyone who raised him? That comes through in Smith's delivery. The pauses. The hesitations. The narrator understands that pause is punctuation.
The Voice Work (And One Small Gripe)
Smith brings a legitimate Southern flavor to the whole thing without making it feel like a minstrel show - which, given the historical context and the language in this book, is a real needle to thread. His Jim has dignity. That matters more than I can say.
Now, I'll be honest - there are moments where Huck and Jim's voices get a little close together. Not often, but occasionally I had to reorient myself on who was speaking. It's a minor thing, and it might just be that I was distracted by a particularly aggressive cyclist nearly taking me out near Navy Pier. (Chicago, man.)
The Duke and the King, though? Perfect. Smith plays them as the oily con men they are, and you can practically smell the snake oil coming off them. These are characters Twain wrote with such barely-concealed contempt, and Smith leans into that. My students would hate them. I love them. (The characters, not my students. Well, sometimes my students.)
Why This Book Deserves Your Ears
I used to assign my students to read this book silently, and then we'd discuss it. Now I'm genuinely reconsidering that approach. Because Twain wrote this to be heard. The dialect, the rhythms, the way sentences tumble over each other like the river itself - it's performance art on the page, and it needs a voice to bring it to life.
Smith's pacing is deliberate. Some folks might find it slow - I saw a few reviews mentioning that. But this reminds me of what Hemingway said about Twain: all American literature comes from Huckleberry Finn. You don't rush through the source of a literary tradition. The prose deserves to be savored.
I listened at 1.0x, obviously. (My students think I'm ancient for this take. They're not wrong about the ancient part.) But seriously - speeding this up would be like fast-forwarding through a jazz solo. You'd get to the end faster, but you'd miss the point entirely.
The Uncomfortable Parts
Let's talk about the elephant in the room. This book uses language that is - and should be - deeply uncomfortable to modern ears. Twain wrote it that way on purpose. He was holding up a mirror to America, showing the casual cruelty of how people talked, how they thought, how they treated human beings as property.
Hearing it spoken aloud makes that discomfort more acute. Good. It should be uncomfortable. This is why we still read the classics - not because they're comfortable, but because they force us to sit with truths we'd rather avoid.
Smith doesn't flinch from this, and he shouldn't. The book is a product of its time while also being a critique of its time. That's the whole point.
Who Should Listen
If you loved Tom Sawyer, this is its spiritual successor - but darker, deeper, more morally complex. If you've only ever read excerpts in high school, you owe yourself the full experience. And if you're a teacher like me, wondering how to make 19th-century literature feel alive to kids who'd rather watch TikTok?
Maybe start here. Maybe let them hear it.
The production quality is clean, the performance is solid, and at eleven and a half hours, it's the perfect length for a week of commutes or a few long walks. Worth pausing the faculty meeting for. (Sorry again, Principal Martinez.)
Just don't speed it up. Let the river take you where it wants to go.
