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Swallows and Amazons (Swallows and Amazons, #1)

Arthur Ransome

Start date: August 1, 2018

Finish date: August 31, 2018

Discussion: Children's Classics Buddy Reads

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Jun 27, 2020 Manybooks rated it did not like it

Shelves: childrens-literature, boring, book-reviews, vacation, adventure, too-much-jargon

Many readers do seem to have both very much enjoyed Arthur Ransome's 1930 Swallows and Amazons and also tend to possess nostalgic remembrances of the novel from their own childhoods. But for me, yes indeed and also most frustratingly and annoyingly, my first personal encounter with Swallows and Amazons and as an older reader (in my fifties) has not at all been the pleasure for which I had been hoping but rather a totally and utterly forgettable, annoyingly tedious long and massively yawn-inducin Many readers do seem to have both very much enjoyed Arthur Ransome's 1930 Swallows and Amazons and also tend to possess nostalgic remembrances of the novel from their own childhoods. But for me, yes indeed and also most frustratingly and annoyingly, my first personal encounter with Swallows and Amazons and as an older reader (in my fifties) has not at all been the pleasure for which I had been hoping but rather a totally and utterly forgettable, annoyingly tedious long and massively yawn-inducing reading slog.

Now I am actually NOT someone who has general and usual reading issues and reservations with textual descriptions (and even with a given novel containing many illustrative representations and in fact also minutely detailed ones). However and yes indeed, what is being described to and for me as a reader must also and equally be rendered, must be penned engagingly and also (usually) without the over-use of topic or theme specific jargon. And no, the almost endless seeming sailing and boating vocabulary found rather en masse in Swallows and Amazons (and right from the beginning of Arthur Ransome's featured narrative) has indeed been bothering and frustrating me so very much that in order to actually be able and willing to complete Swallows and Amazons and not be tempted to abandon it as yet another did not finish book, I indeed needed to constantly be skimming as my massive irritation with this sailing jargon and also the rather incessant repetition of it really did increase exponentially the more I was reading.

Furthermore but importantly, for a novel that is supposed to be depicting and showing imaginative adventure, discovery and two groups of children joyfully playing at being pirates at sea, for the first two-hundred pages or so of Swallows and Amazons (at least in my humble opinion), surprisingly very little bona fide action and adventure actually even takes place (and also, that in Swallows and Amazons in particular the characters of both Susan and Roger Walker are overly stereotyped, this has really and truly been and continues to be a major bone of contention for me, with Susan appearing as primarily and simply a typical "mother" figure whose only real and important role seems to be managing the cooking, taking care of the Walkers' home away from home and Roger generally being shown by Arthur Ransome as someone with really no defining personality traits at all except that he is still really quite young and prior to the arrival of Victoria, the baby of the Walker family).

Combined with the fact that I have also felt majorly uncomfortable with how throughout Swallows and Amazons both the Walker and the Blackett siblings are so often playing at, pretending to be encountering and sometimes even fighting with so-called natives and savages (a sign of the times perhaps, but it still does make me rather cringe to hear John Walker kind of even if just in jest be denigrating the Dixons as native savages, as there is in my opinion also a sense of British upper middle class superiority to and disdain for farmers, for the peasantry present in and with John's attitude), I really did not end up at all finding Swallows and Amazons either enjoyable to read or in any manner engaging, and as such only a one star reading experience for me (albeit that I am still glad to finally have read Swallows and Amazons and to be able to now point out and make the justified claim that no, Swallows and Amazons definitely has not been a novel to and for my reading tastes). ...more

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