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September 20, 2005
Treasure Island
Mark Liberman at Language Log has traced the pirate's "Rrrrr" to a 1950 movie version of Treasure Island. Which reminded me of something. I read Treasure Island a few years ago and was just delighted and amazed by its readability. That plot really moved. Really un-put-downable. (Unfortunately its ending is weak--things get wrapped up a bit too quickly--but otherwise I'd say the book is perfect.) I was also amused that it had all the cliches of the pirate genre--X marks the spot and all that. But of course they weren't cliches back then--or were they?? I seem to recall reading somewhere that much of Treasure Island was ripped off from a book from the 1820s or so. (I can't remember the details.) This disturbed me, but then I decided that novels back then were like movies and TV today--it was all about doing a good job, not about originality. I mean, nobody criticizes Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg etc. of ripping off old movies--that's just beside the point.
On a related topic, I found Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde also to be incredibly readable, and also very suspenseful. Yes, I knew that the Dr. and the Mr. were the same person, but there was a lot of suspense about what would happen next. This was also an interesting book because I did not find its individual sentences to be well-written--they were foggy, much like the London weather that pervades the book--but on the whole the paragraphs whipped by. In contrast, Moby Dick was just full of sparkling sentences, yet each page was a struggle to read.
Posted by Andrew at September 20, 2005 12:11 AM
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