书名：The Adventures of Tom Sawyer 汤姆·索亚历险记

难度：Lexile蓝思阅读指数980L
作者：Mark Twain马克·吐温
出版社名称：Signet Classics
出版时间：2008
语种：英文
ISBN：9780451530936
商品尺寸：10.6 x 1.8 x 17.3 cm
包装：简装
页数：256

推荐理由：
1.美国小说家马克·吐温的代表作，以其浓厚的深具地方特色的幽默和对人物敏锐观察，一跃成为伟大的儿童文学作品，也是一首美国”黄金时代”的田园牧歌；
2.小说的时代在南北战争前，写的虽是圣彼得堡小镇，但该镇某种程度上可以说是当时美国社会的缩影；
3.小说通过主人公的冒险经历，对美国虚伪庸俗的社会习俗、伪善的宗教仪式和刻板陈腐的学校教育进行了讽刺和批判；
4马克·吐温对儿童心理的观察精细入微，描写合情合理。读者阅读此书能够重新回味一下那些童真童趣时刻；
5.柯林斯经典系列，含历史背景及作者介绍（Life & Times），后附英语词汇注释（Glossary of Classic Literature），生词表采用《柯林斯英语词典》的解释，有助于读者学习理解；
6.轻型环保纸印刷，小巧轻便，方便随身携带阅读。
The classic adventures of one of American literature’s most beloved characters from Mark Twain, one of America’s best-loved writers.

Here is a lighthearted excursion into boyhood, a nostalgic return into the simple, rural Missouri world of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Becky Thatcher, and Aunt Polly. It is a universal world of attending school and playing hooky, pranks and punishments, villains and desperate adventure, seen through the eyes of a boy who might be the young Mark Twain himself.

There is sheer delight in Tom Sawyer—even in the darkest moments, affection and wit permeate its pages. For adults it re-creates the vanished dreams of youth. For younger readers it unveils the boundaries of tantalizing horizons still to come. And for everyone, it reveals the mind and heart of one of America’s best-loved writers.

With an Introduction by Robert Tilton
and an Afterword by Geoffrey Sanborn
In his person and in his pursuits, Mark Twain (1835-1910) was a man of extraordinary contrasts. Although he left school at twelve, when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing, but toward the end of his life he had to resort to lecture tours to pay his debts. He was hot-tempered, profane, and sentimental—and also pessimistic, cynical, and tortured by self-doubt. His nostalgia for the past helped produce some of his best books. He lives in American letters as a great artist, the writer whom William Dean Howells called “the Lincoln of our literature.”

Robert Tilton is a Associate Professor of English and Department Head at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. He is the author of Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative and co-author of Pocahontas: Her Life and Legend, George Washington: The Man Behind the Myths, Old Virginia: The Pursuit of a Pastoral Ideal, and Lee and Grant, and has written the Introduction to the Signet Classics edition of Cooper’s The Deerslayer.  

Geoffrey Sanborn, Associate Professor of Literature at Bard College, is the author of The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a Postcolonial Reader, Whipscars and Tattoos: The Last of the Mohicans, Moby-Dick, and the Maori, and Plagiarama! William Wells Brown and the Aesthetic of Attractions.
Chapter 1

“Tom!”
No answer.
“Tom!”
No answer.
“What’s gone with that boy, I wonder? You TOM!”
No answer.
The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked over them, about the room; then she put them up and looked out under them. She seldom or never looked through them for so small a thing as a boy; they were her state pair, the pride of her heart, and were built for “style,” not service;—she could have seen through a pair of stove lids just as well. She looked perplexed for a moment, and then said, not fiercely, but still loud enough for the furniture to hear:
“Well, I lay if I get hold of you I’ll—”
She did not finish, for by this time she was bending down and punching under the bed with the broom—and so she needed breath to punctuate the punches with. She resurrected nothing but the cat.
“I never did see the beat of that boy!”
She went to the open door and stood in it and looked out among the tomato vines and “jimpson” weeds that constituted the garden. No Tom. So she lifted up her voice, at an angle calculated for distance, and shouted:
“Y-o-u-u Tom!”
There was a slight noise behind her and she turned just in time to seize a small boy by the slack of his roundabout and arrest his flight.
“There! I might ‘a’ thought of that closet. What you been doing in there?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing! Look at your hands. And look at your mouth. What is that truck?”
“I don’t know, aunt.”
“Well I know. It’s jam—that’s what it is. Forty times I’ve said if you didn’t let that jam alone I’d skin you. Hand me that switch.”
The switch hovered in the air—the peril was desperate—
“My! Look behind you, aunt!”
The old lady whirled around, and snatched her skirts out of danger. The lad fled, on the instant, scrambled up the high board fence, and disappeared over it.
His aunt Polly stood surprised a moment, and then broke into a gentle laugh.
“Hang the boy, can’t I never learn anything? Ain’t he played me tricks enough like that for me to be looking out for him by this time? But old fools is
the biggest fools there is. Can’t learn an old dog new tricks, as the saying is. But my goodness, he never plays them alike, two days, and how is a body to know what’s coming? He ‘pears to know just how long he can torment me before I get my dander up, and he knows if he can make out to put me off for a minute or make me laugh, it’s all down again and I can’t hit him a lick. I ain’t doing my duty by that boy, and that’s the Lord’s truth, goodness knows. Spare the rod and spile the child, as the Good Book says. I’m a—laying up sin and suffering for us both, I know. He’s full of the Old Scratch, but laws—a—me! he’s my own dead sister’s boy, poor thing, and I ain’t got the heart to lash him, somehow. Every time I let him off my conscience does hurt me so, and every time I hit him my old heart most breaks. Well—a—well, man that is born of woman is of few days and full of trouble, as the Scripture says, and I reckon it’s so. He’ll play hookey this evening,* and I’ll just be obleeged to make him work, tomorrow, to punish him. It’s mighty hard to make him work Saturdays, when all the boys is having holiday, but he hates work more than he hates anything else, and I’ve got to do some of my duty by him, or I’ll be the ruination of the child.”