Treasure Island

By Robert Louis Stevenson

Have you ever stayed at the Country Inn and Suites? It’s a great hotel. Free breakfast (which means free lunch and dinner), cookies in the evening, oh and free books. Well you check out the books and you don’t have to return them. Which is good because I only go to a Country Inn and Suites a few times a year.

Now I used to go to one in Augusta, Georgia. They had new releases. I remember going when the Lord of the Rings movies were coming out and they had the books behind the counter. The current Country Inn and Suites that I go to is in Pearl, MS. Close to the Jackson Mississippi airport which has some of the worst airport employees around. When I say they are slow, well, it’s an understatement. The hotel doesn’t have as good of a selection or change up the books very much compared to Augusta. Maybe it’s because the bookcase is in the corner and not that many people take the books so they don’t go through the case very fast so they don’t have a need to order new ones. Oh well. I think they also cheap out and buy the least expensive books they can because all their books have their hotel logo printed on the cover.

But as luck would have it last time I was there I picked up Treasure Island and Murder on the Orient Express. I had always wanted to read both books. And hey the price was right.

Treasure Island was written back in 1883. I always thought of it as a little kids book but you know it is a good adventure story. Jim Hawkins gets hooked up with a pirate who dies in the inn his parents run. He finds a treasure map in the man’s chest (his sea chest not his body chest) and gets the local townsmen to help him find it. Except that the crew of their ship turns out to be pirates who are also after the booty. Fighting ensues, treasure is found, generations are left with a vision of what pirates were like, and the parrot screams out “pieces of eight” over and over. Long John Silver enters our mind as the ultimate pirate. Later his name is used at a franchise for a fast food restaurant where the entire menu consists of things that are battered and deep fat fried.

Now I enjoyed this book. I really liked that the book was presented as it was written and the language was not modernized. The problem with this is that the sentence structure is sometimes different. I can’t really give an example but I would read a sentence and the adjectives and verbs would be backwards from where you would expect them to be placed. It didn’t hurt the story but it is interesting to note. Yeah I should probably be giving examples of this but honestly it’s been a while since I read this book. I guess I should have been writing my thoughts down as I finished each book on the list, it really would have made everything much easier. Oh well, there’s always 2008.