Book #41: Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
I remember being shown an old movie version of Treasure Island twice at school when I was about eight years old. In those days, though I got bored easily by anything that wasn’t a cartoon and didn’t have talking puppets, so I was nonplussed. I recently decided to read the book and enjoyed it a lot.
It starts when Jim Hawkins is visited by a stranger, Billy Bones, who has a treasure map, and dies suddenly after being visited by a mysterious blind man. This all leads to an adventure on the seas and the eponymous “treasure island” to find where the treasure is buried, and it leads to the introduction of a very memorable literary character, Long John Silver.
Long John Silver is a fantastic character, who seems to start off as a villain and end up as something of an anti-hero in the novel, as he instigates a mutiny during the attempts to uncover the treasure. The book is really easy to read, and I found myself compelled to keep reading to see what happened next.
Next book: Persuasion by Jane Austen