190 pages
Published 1883
Read from November 18 to November 19
Rating: 2.5 out of 5 (maybe 3 with nostalgia)
* Denotes a reread.
I began the year hoping to shift my reading focus away from big numbers of books to books I’m enthusiastic about reading. That didn’t last long; I resumed padding my numbers with manga and novellas pretty much immediately. As we speed inexorably toward December, I’m officially at the fuck-it phase: I want to reach 100 books this year, and I’m happy to cram in anything I can to get there.
That said, I’ve idly wished to revisit this childhood staple for a while now. After the usual suspects, like War of the Worlds and Jurassic Park, this was one of my most frequent rereads as a tween. Whatever his other qualities, Stevenson was skilled at portraying the irrational fears and half-understood thoughts of childhood:
How [the man with one leg] haunted my dreams…. On stormy nights… I would see him in a thousand forms, and with a thousand diabolical expressions. Now the leg would be cut off at the knee, now at the hip; now he was a monstrous kind of creature who had never had but the one leg, and that in the middle of his body. To see him leap and run and pursue me over hedge and ditch was the worst of nightmares.
As that’s exactly how my own imagination operated, even in waking hours, I felt perceived in a way all too rare in my youth.
Nostalgia’s doing a lot of the heavy lifting here, but even as an adult, it’s an enjoyable read. It’s solidly constructed, briskly paced, and brims with iconic scenes and images. It is exactly the book it sets out to be. Certain aspects haven’t aged well, naturally. But it was a welcome visit back to childhood escapism.
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