The 306 Greatest Books #134 - Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. This book can be found on the Observer Book List.

As with many stories I have read, this one was an odd one. I assume most people are familiar with the premise of the story but if not, I wouldn't read this review as I will spoil it. That being said, the premise of the story is that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are the same person, transformed through chemical concoctions of the doctor's creation. This is what I knew going into the story. However, the story is set up as a mystery. Who is this Mr. Hyde? And what is his relation to our dear friend Dr. Jekyll? Reading the story, it felt like a second read through, where I already knew the ending and I was just reading it this time to catch up on the details I missed. A very weird feeling, considering I have never read the book before. Overall, the story was alright. It is written as an autobiographical account from a lawyer friend of Dr. Jekyll's who witnessed the whole thing. The prose is fairly straight forward, except for the last chapter, which was "written" by Dr. Jekyll and gets rather wordy for my liking. It is very short, taking me only a few hours to read, however nothing really ever grabbed my attention. I was rather interested in how the "big reveal" progressed through the story and seeing the groundwork laid down for it was fascination. But overall, I would say that if you wanted to read it, it wouldn't take very long and you may find it interesting, but I wouldn't go out of my way to find it, as it feels that pop-culture has ruined any surprises that were built into the story.

The 306 Greatest Books #19 - Treasure Island

I am going back and posting all of my previous book reviews so that they are listed on my site in chronological order. The reviews are dated for the time when I read the book, hence the reason many of them will be listed for times before this website existed. 

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. This book can be found on the Sybervision and the BBC Book Lists. 

Upon graduating college, I was determined to better myself, and one of the ways I planned on doing that was by reading the 100 Greatest Books of all time. Treasure Island was my first official foray into reading all of those. Most of the book I read first were books that I incidentally had obtained from my grandfathers' collections but eventually I was able to afford some more books on my own. But this was my first real book on the list that didn't have anything to do with a class assignment. The one reason I picked this first was that it was fairly short. I needed to go on a plane flight and picked this book to take with me. The story was a fast paced, "swash-buckling adventure" stories about pirates and the seven seas. It didn't even last the whole round trip to read. I was done with it in a few hours but it was a lot of fun. The book was written as a bedtime story for the authors children. He would write a chapter at a time and read them to the kids. This allowed for the story to grow on its own and maintain a fairly quick pace throughout. The time that I had read the story was around the time I had seen the movie Treasure Planet as well, which followed this story fairly closely (with some obvious changes). Overall, this is a quick, fun read that I definitely recommend.