When I was Huckleberry's age, I was in thrall to his creator. I lived in a small town with a small library. But in my eleventh summer I read every book by Samuel Clemens, including lesser works like The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg and Puddn'head Wilson, and classic bits like "His Grandfather's Old Ram," a yarn that promises upfront to be about a sheep, but never quite gets around to it.

I was one of those kids who could vanish into a big book, read all day long, and never tire of it. Some of the contemporary satires, like A Tramp Abroad, went over my head, but I liked it that way. And any writer that asks you to believe that the chamois is a gnat-sized creature of the Swiss Alps, or that it's possible to enter a glacier race, you have to love.

I believe I picked up a little of Twain's voice that summer, and after all this time I don't see why I should have to give it back.

But, to bring things up to date -- my wife and I are bearing down on our 11 year old this summer, because he prefers to play on his PC than to read. I strew bookish bait around the house to lure him to literature -- Spiderman, Calvin and Hobbes, Star Wars, anything to get him into the reading habit.

But the pull of the computer, like a current bearing him down river, is too strong. And he's gotten damn adept at it. He can locate a patch online to update a game installation, or go netfishing for a raftmate whose face he will never see, with whom to float downstream.

I maintain he doesn't want to read Tom Sawyer because he is Tom Sawyer, picking his fun himself, and not letting well-intended but hopelessly obtuse Aunt Polly choose for him.

Question: have I betrayed the spirit of my mentor by raising a boy who would rather play than read, or have I duplicated it?

Twain was a reader, but mostly of newspapers. And he himself adored technology. I once got into trouble by stating in print that Huckleberry Finn was the first book manuscript typed on a typewriter. I saw the typewriter on his writing desk at his Hartford home, on a tour. Then a reader send me a link showing an auction photo of the actual manuscript, in Twain's hand. I have since backpedaled to insisting it was another book. Possibly Puddn'head Wilson.

Twain made a fortune becoming the 19th century's greatest celebrity, known wherever he showed his wintry white mantle and summer white suit. And he blew it all investing -- precipitously and passionately, like a boy selecting rock candy from a jar -- in an automatic typesetting machine that couldn't quite set type automatically.

Twain loved new stuff, whatever was around the next bend. He was an enthusiast to his bones, steaming up the Missisippi, or panning for nuggets in Nevada, even venturing out to the Sandwich Islands in search of engagement. He would have set up shop for himself, as downloadable as he was quotable, and not relied on the bristled boars of Lexington Avenue to publish his work. His grandfather's old ram would give way to 128MB EDO (60ns) RAM.

He would have asked this question: If you don't point a young person today to the Internet as an unploughed field, or an unread library, what do you point him or her at? The Net is our Library of Congress, Mississippi, Nevada, and Hawaii all rolled into one.

And anyway, the stubbornest heart makes occasional concessions. Like my son tonight, sitting by his mother on the futon in the drawing room. She is reading about the undercurrents of the river, that pull this way and that at a boatful of boy, gently steering him toward the next bend.