3. Treasure Island

Let's try this again.

We'll start with a comment on how I feel unable to articulate my thoughts properly. I guess part of the reason for this whole blog is to a) practice critical reading on my part and b) firm up my writing skills and my ability to express myself on paper. So things might seem fumbling and experimental in these first posts and maybe they will never progress to the level I think they should but it's an exercise and we'll see how things go. Part of my problem is that I don't want to just write up a summation of the plot, I want to explore how the book made me feel or what it made me think of, I want to dig deeper. Sometimes I think that maybe there is no deeper, maybe there is only the surface ... but when I think like that I also hope that maybe I missed something.

I've noticed that I tend to start with a short explanation of why I read the book I am discussing/how it came to be on my bookshelf. I don't exactly know why that is important but it seems to be so we'll start no differently today. Although I must admit that I am not sure where Treasure Island came from. Usually someone recommended the book or I liked the title or it is for book club or I like the author or whatever. But I have no strong memory of any of those things. It is like the book just appeared on my shelf one day and I realized I had never read it and things went from there. Not knowing, or not remembering, why I originally wanted to read Treasure Island may have something to do with the apathy I seem to feel towards it - to be honest I just want to write "meh" and be done with it. It's not that it wasn't a good book, or poorly written. I guess it just didn't grip me in any immediately identifiable way. I didn't love the characters, I didn't envision myself in the setting, I didn't find anything specific to relate to. I also kind of felt "been there, done that" not in the sense that I had actually been there, done that (maybe "been there, read that" would be better?) ... maybe I have read other books that were based, however loosely, on this one? And it didn't help that I had some problems with the language ... especially when Long John Silver was talking. It's like my brain took the words on the page and turned them into gobbledygook and it was immensely frustrating. It's like when someone mumbles and you know that they are speaking English and the words should make sense but there is just some processing barrier and you feel like you have this blank look on your face while you try to make heads or tails of the situation. And eventually maybe you just don't want to talk to that person anymore. That is kind of how I felt - that I just didn't want to have to try so hard to make sense of a book that didn't really enlighten me anyways. Now, I know that I often feel that way at the beginning of a Shakespeare play, but usually one act in and I have developed a rhythm and things start to flow. I just never found my stride in Treasure Island I guess.

The one highpoint was that I kept hearing Johnny Depp as Cap'n Jack Sparrow in my head while I was reading and anything that makes me think of Cap'n Jack can't be all bad.