4. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson Somewhere in my childhood, I missed reading this classic, despite having two copies of A Child's Garden of Verses . My boyfriend recently reread this and suggested I do so, so I borrowed his copy and spent a night immersed in the ultimate pirate fantasy for a boy of a certain age. I can't say much for plot, language, or character, but as I am currently in a fiction workshop, I was looking for what made the story tick, and it clearly has a sense of urgency and adventure and makes use of a cliffhanger at the end of nearly every chapter. I did notice that Long John Silver's speech in particular kept nicely in character, "and I'll lay to that." He is clearly the most psychologically complex of the characters, the rest of the adults seem either dull or blindingly stupid. So the hero is our adolescent boy narrator Jim Hawkins, and from the praise of the adults around him, including the malicious Long John, and the feats h...
Life, Books, and SFF