Re-reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

I just finished The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for the first time.  I don't believe in censoring literature, nonetheless, reading the "n" word would be difficult to do in a read aloud.  And how free those boys were!  Today, their island bonfires would be discovered by drones the first night they were missing, and there would have been two head counts before the bus ever pulled away from the caves.  These would have been meaningless comments to me, had I not read this a week ago.  I don't believe I've ever seen a good movie version of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer with the whole story depicted.  I'm not sure that I ever knew that The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are actually two separate books.  I think I always used the two names interchangably in one title.  Mark Twain was either a careful observer of boys, or he remembered his own childhood very well.  As a teacher, reading the book reminds me that kids have their minds on many things other than their schoolwork during a school day.  Their play and their relationships with each other can be so rough and so important. 

Huckleberry Finn starts out with a boys club devoted to robbing and killing.  The boys don't ever carry out their plans to be outlaws, but no wonder some have wanted to pull the books from school library bookshelves.  Like I said, I'm not a censor.  I like the honesty of books.  The world of boys just being boys doesn't read as playfully today in light of gangs, but it goes without saying, that people have to read these books in the context of when they were written; the books are windows to another time.  I have a whole set of Mark Twain's books, so I want to finish them all.