Review: Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson

Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson
1883

An Alexandrine Couplet About Treasure Island

A poor kid is given a pirate treasure map,

goes on an adventure—Arr, arr, arr, arr, arr, ARRRRRR!

Oh, Treasure Island.

It’s a kid’s story.

It’s a coming of age story.

It’s an adventure story.

Except, honestly, even the most adventurous books from 1883 don’t often come off as “adventures”, and kid and coming of age stories are usually written for . . . well . . . kids and people who are coming of age. I don’t know any kids who’d make it through this. My version is about 350 pages long, and the writing isn’t “kid friendly” in the modern context.

That being said, it’s really fun, and Robert did intend adults to read it, too. Also, it’s the original pirate adventure story in our popular culture. Check it:

                                                              

This book invented treasure maps marked with Xs, peg-legged pirates, and pirates with parrots on their shoulders. In history, no pirate ever drew a map with an X, if a guy had a bird on a pirate ship someone would have eaten it, and while many seamen in the 1700s had missing legs or hands, we wouldn’t care without Long John Silver clomping around on his wooden stump. Robert is the reason that’s part of our collective image of piracy.

Also, we wouldn’t have the Disney attraction Pirates Of The Caribbean if it weren’t for this book. So that might make it the most important book in the history of Western Literature. Yeah, I just said that. 

The dog is cute, after all.

Anyway, the book’s about a poor kids named Jim who leaves home to go on a treasure hunt. He hangs out with and later fights pirates, and is even tempted to become one (because really, who isn’t?). Actually, a big part of Treasure Island revolves around the moral ambiguity of Long John Silver, the chief pirate, who befriends John and is not nearly as evil as pirates are supposed to be. 

Parents were probably pissed that their kids were reading about fun pirates.

John comes of age on the high seas, has to choose between siding with the fun, rum swilling pirates or the respectable captain and doctor, knifes a guy, finds a vast treasure, and returns home safe. So, that sounds more fun than the average school trip, and way more fun than my eighth grade school trip to Washington DC. Not that seeing Congress in action wasn’t totally fun for an eighth grader . . .

. . . But this would be a lot more fun if pirates were involved. 

Everyone in this picture agrees.

So, Treasure Island is a very good book for 1883. It’s exciting, readable, doesn’t overdo the scenery descriptions as many books then did, and has an interesting narrative with good asides and plenty of twists and turns. Still, it’s not like the action/adventure novels of today. Put it this way: if Jason Bourne were on the island, he’d kill all the pirates and take the treasure in half the number of pages. But it really is a good book and if you’re into pirates it’s worth a read. If you’re not into pirates . . . well, maybe just watch one of the movie versions. Because there’s over 50.

Including this one, about pirates in space. 

And as awesome as 

SPACE PIRATES

are, you could probably skip it.

Oh, and since this is an English Language blog, this:

I think “arr” has won, at least in common parlance

Review: Sacre Bleu, Christopher Moore

Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d'Art 
Christopher Moore
2010

An Alexandrine Couple About Sacre Bleu

                                       A kid hangs out with Toulouse-Lautrec and others

                                     bangs a chick, falls in love—has art themed adventures

Christopher Moore writes about the impressionist and modernist painters who lived in Paris in the late 1800s and early 1900s. As always with Chris, there’s lots of researcher and comic absurdity, but it’s still accessible. It isn’t so bizarre as to be unreadable, and isn’t so much about artists that it can’t be understood by everyone.  

Sacre Bleu is about painters, and love, and banging hot chicks (it’s actually about that), and the girls who painters fall in love with and what they’ll do for those girls. Really it’s about inspiration. And a sadistic dwarf, a donkey, World War I, bakers, Van Gogh’s ear, and other things. And, of course, about the color blue. Lots about the color blue.

Thankfully, Rothko goes completely unmentioned.

Also, it makes fun of Seurat.

Anything that makes fun of Seurat makes me happy.

So that’s what it’s about. As for a review, it’s good. It’s an easy read, and fast, like all Chris Moore books, and you’ll learn something about the Impressionists, and about the chemistry of paint, and some things about Paris, but all that comes off as really fun, not terrible like it sounds. Put it this way: if you like the idea of following a really fun version of Toulouse-Lautrec as he adventures from bar to whorehouse and gets in fights to defend his friends, this is totally for you.

This guy finally gets to be as fun as he looks,

or, more realistically,

as fun as he’d look if he was smiling in this pic.

Bottom line, as good as this book is, it’s honestly not Chris’s best. If you’ve never read him, I’d recommend A Dirty Job or The Blood Sucking series, but you should probably just read down this list and see which one appeals the most. If you have read him and liked him, you’ll like this one, too.

Dear God – A Review actually under 350 words. I’m amazed. 

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson

1830-1886

First, the “snake” is a train. 

 

Now to important matters – all those dashes throughout all her poems. What’s the deal with those? (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, Google “Emily Dickinson poem” and read the first 2 you come across).

Are you ready to impress your teachers or lit nerd friends?

After Emily died, they found a grammar book in her room. It was really old and had a section on public speaking. It instructed the speaker to use the marks “-“, “/”, and “\” to represent whether you voice should stay the same, go up, or go down as you read poetry or give speeches in public. In Emily’s original poems, the ones she wrote by hand, she used dashes, just like in the printed versions you buy on Amazon today. Except when she wrote the dashes some of them where strait, some slanted up, and some slanted down. 

They weren’t dashes or hyphens – Emily just understood that poetry is meant to be read out loud and was giving accent marks to her work. She may never have intended to read it publicly herself (Em was a bit of a recluse), but she was providing an inflection aide for the sake of posterity.

But the typist who originally transcribed her work (probably a bored, incompetent typist at that) just converted all those marks into standard, strait dashes. Because, you know, who cares about attention to detail? 

The accent marks have been dashes ever since.

And now we have this mural, which is a pretty good likeness of Em, actually:

So there's that.

 

I Think My Big Brother Lives On This Street

Maybe 1984 wasn't about dystopian futures or fascism or any of those other things.  Honestly, I always wondered if maybe George Orwell just had an older brother who was a dick.

So if you don't go within 500 meters of this sign, Big Brother isn't watching you.

Review: War And Peace, by Leo Tolstoy

War And Peace (Вoйнá и мир, Bitches)
Leo Tolstoy
1869

2 Alexandrine Couplets About War And Peace

It was the best of times—it was the worst of times

         Oh wait, that’s the wrong book—this one is much better.

Russian people hang out—speak a lot of French,

     fall in love, go to war—and then come back, mostly.

War And Peace.  Written by this guy:

I was going to be Tolstoy for Halloween, but it was too scary.

I once made it a goal to read the world’s longest novels.  I read them, so you don’t have to.  Except I didn’t get past the first 100 pages of Ulysses.  I couldn’t even finish that one on cd. 

The Oxford World’s Classics Edition of War And Peace weighs in 1440 pages and 561,093 words, though this varies based on translation. 

Eighteen trees died to make just this copy.

It’s a bit shorter in Russian because they have fewer words than English.  Regardless, it’s one of the longer novels ever published.  Were you at war, you could use it as a weapon; were you at peace, you could build houses out of it.  Though if you think of the Harry Potter series as one giant novel, that’s actually about twice as long – over 1,000,000 words.  Just sayin’.

  

J. K. Rowling devoted more pages to Luna Lovegood than Leo did to Napoleon Bonaparte. 

  

So what is it about?  Well, you know . . .

war . . .

and peace.

The story is too long to narrate here.  It starts before the Napoleonic Wars in Russia and ends after them, so the early 1800s.  Most of the characters are Russian aristocracy, but the book paints a vibrant picture of people throughout the country.

War And Peace is often considered the greatest book in Western Literature.  That doesn’t mean it’s the most fun or entertaining, has the best prose or construction, or is the best in any single way.  It means the totality of the book, the thing as a whole, towers above the rest.  Here’s why: 

War And Peace has everything.  I said this earlier about The Three Musketeers, but I was only referring to plot.  War And Peace has action, intrigue, romance, blah blah blah.  It’s as much a love story as it is a Western, a political treatise, a comedy, and a history.  But it also has every lifestyle, discussing in detail the rich, poor, royalty, merchants, slaves, men and women, soldiers and civilians, the sick and the healthy, rationalists, cultist, anarchists.  It uses every point of view and plot device.  It ranges from 3rd person omniscient to 1st person close.  It has long, cerebral, typically Russian inner monologues, and fast-pasted battle scenes.  It literally does everything.  I suppose it had the room to. 

You see, War And Peace really does have everything.  We could make allotments for some sci-fi ideas that didn’t exist yet, but the essential nature of the statement I’m about to make is true:  If you’ve read War And Peace, you’ve read every story ever told, and every way of telling a story.  Pause for a moment and let that sink in. 

Would I recommend it? – Only if you’re unemployed, a series bibliophile, or one of the 12 lovers of Russian literature out there.  It’s not that it’s not for everyone, it’s just that, like all Russian literature, it’s a commitment.  

Then again, if you’ve read all the Harry Potter’s in a row, this is no big deal.  

This is twice as long, so you have 1/2 the excuse. 

Review: The Rum Diaries, by Hunter S. Thompson

The Rum Diaries

Hunter S. Thompson

Written: 1959 (or so)

Published: 1999

An Alexandrine Couplet Containing Paul Kemp’s Advice For Your Early 20s 

                                         Move to Puerto Rico – wander around drinking

                                         and if you have spare time – existential crisis

There’s a reason that The Rum Diaries took so long to get published, and a reason it’s not Hunter’s most popular book.  For one thing, The Rum Diaries is NOT gonzo journalism.  It’s not exciting, thrilling, or different.  Hunter fans will tell you it’s really slow, laconic, and moody.  He wrote it 10 years before the Kentucky Derby article got him noticed and cemented his style. 

It’s like this painting

At least in pacing and content, The Rum Diaries is the opposite of virtually everything Hunter wrote.  To people who’ve read Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, or seen the movie, this is not what they’re expecting.

The Rum Dairies is the story of Hunter Thompson Paul Kemp, a young journalist in Puerto Rico.  He spends most of his time bewildered, sweating, drinking beer or rum, eating in a back-yard-turned-burger-joint, and chasing after a pretty girl.  As the newspaper he works for, and the people he knows, slowly implode, Kemp is more and more disillusioned about the life he’s leading.

Paul was drinking this rum.

He should have been drinking this rum instead.

Unlike Fear And Loathing, there’s very little about drugs in The Rum Diaries – a few references to weed, but nothing pivotal or spectacular.  They drink a lot but in general it doesn’t end in mayhem.

Like it does in this scene from Fear And Loathing

Nor are their references to sports or political dissections, as there are in most of Hunter’s work.  The Rum Dairies is just Hunter writing about Hunter. 

Here’s why you should read it:

Okay, yes, the book is slow.  But it’s brilliant.  It really is.  It great because Hunter wrote this before he went bat-shit insane and turned into a drug addled, gun-toting maniac.  If you like Hunter’s other work, you can see in this how he goes from being essentially passable as a human being to who he became.  And what’s worse: he can, too.  He writes about how he’s torn between living a normal life or a life of bizarre, wanton depravity, and how he doesn’t feel like he’s the one making that choice.  You can see him seeing his own future, being slightly horrified, and being unable to do anything about it.  It’s fascinating as a character study and it informs Hunter’s later works.  It’s got nothing to do with Johnny Depp bumbling around Puerto Rico reprising his role of the Hunter Thompson character from Fear And Loathing.  Johnny played that part brilliantly, but in The Rum Diaries movie he made a fast paced, glib mockery of some of Hunter’s most poignant writing.  Johnny, a real life friend of Hunter, should be ashamed, or at least explain himself.

Overall, this is a great book.  You should give it a try, or give it a try again.  Just go in expecting long, carefully illustrated scenes and lots of cerebral monologues.  The thing is, this is really the exact same thing Hunter does so well throughout his career, and he does it as brilliantly here as anywhere else.  It’s just that later he was doing much more wild things while he was writing. 

Hunter S. Thompson