Treasure Island in Never too Late to Read Classics

Mar 20, 2008 Laura rated it really liked it

Shelves: 1001-books-you-must-read-before-you, 3ms, british-literature, fiction-19th-century, e-books, children-ya

Treasure Island is an adventure novel by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, narrating a tale of "buccaneers and buried gold". Its influence is enormous on popular perceptions of pirates, including such elements as treasure maps marked with an "X", schooners, the Black Spot, tropical islands, and one-legged seamen bearing parrots on their shoulders. ...more

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Apr 16, 2014 Pamela(AllHoney) rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, children-fiction-young-adult, fiction-general, books-to-movies

I, like so many, grew up watching Treasure Island and dreamt of pirates. This is the story of young Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver and the rest of the crew of the Hispaniola with lots of action and adventure, betrayal, loyalty, and the search for treasure. Arrgh! Ahoy, me matey!

It was fun and entertaining. Which means a lot in my opinion. I don't really know why I never read it when I was younger and could probably appreciated it a little more. ...more

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May 24, 2019 Kelly_Hunsaker_reads ... rated it liked it

Shelves: childrens, adventure, read-in-2019, classics

I so wish that I had read this classic as a middle-school aged girl, as I think the adventure would have carried me away and I would have lived the life of a pirate for a week! The book is so full of bigger-than-life characters, language and settings. It is a fun read, I just think it would have fit me better at that stage of life.

Stevenson gives us the story of an 18th century innkeeper in England named Jim Hawkings. Unfortunately, the inn is not very busy and seems to attract only the most uns ...more

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Mar 13, 2018 Douglas Beagley rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Read aloud with Althea. Another in the list of classics I never got around to. Wonderful writing— Stevenson casually does things that a lot of writers don’t even attempt, and yet the prose still appears effortless and is accessible. A compact, exciting, enjoyable tale.

It’s an adventure story, and not a modernist novel—focus is on the action itself and not on the journey of mankind or someone’s inner journey, etc. And yet it has tremendous moments of poignancy.

Because the tropes and beat of an a Read aloud with Althea. Another in the list of classics I never got around to. Wonderful writing— Stevenson casually does things that a lot of writers don’t even attempt, and yet the prose still appears effortless and is accessible. A compact, exciting, enjoyable tale.

It’s an adventure story, and not a modernist novel—focus is on the action itself and not on the journey of mankind or someone’s inner journey, etc. And yet it has tremendous moments of poignancy.

Because the tropes and beat of an action story have been reused and turned into Hollywood cliches, I kept expecting the next thing to happen, and I was often wrong. This book comes before all that. If they made it into a beat-for-beat movie now, it would be called fresh, original— but it may just be that the familiar formula was only half developed at the time.

The clearest example comes at the end, when my brain said there was going to be one last double-cross, one last jump scare, etc, the way a modern movie would require— and it didn’t occur. But more powerfully, the book let the heroes be good-hearted, and yet capable of failure, capable of killing, and the narrator was capable of making stupid choices.

I loved the descriptions. And it was wonderful to see action written so well, without making a big deal of itself.

This book doesn’t stand up to a modern understanding of the world—it is a book entirely peopled by white British men, undoubtedly written with the expectation that only white British men would ever read it. This actually helps keep the book acceptable, because women and any other race or nationality do not appear at all (one or two brief glimpses), so you don’t have to see overt racism or sexism. And since the universe of the book is almost completely outside of real life, this doesn’t read as a racist or sexist omission, either. It’s fortunate, as it means you can read a piece of popular fiction from the 1800s without constantly cringing.

In a more amusing flaw, I think (but could be wrong) that the book defies modern geology as well— could Skeleton Island exist, with the flora, fauna and hills as described? Nutmeg trees, goats, the Spyglass mountain, etc? ...more

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Nov 13, 2020 Tom Britz rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I can now say that I have read Treasure Island. A book that I probably should have read as a kid, but never did. I found it to be a classic tale of pirates, buried treasure and all the skulduggery of life at sea in the late 1700's. Robert Louis Stevenson has written a timeless classic that is not just a children's book and it stands the test of time admirably. ...more

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