The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

This is two books for the price of one!  Actually, it's two books for the price of none.  That's great value!

Both of these books are about some bad-ass kids.  Kids who seem to have an unhealthy obsession with dead animals.  Tom Sawyer is a shorter and lighter read.  Huckleberry Finn is harder to read, but much more illustrative of life in pre-Civil War America.  One of the things I found most amusing in these books was reading about the superstitions of all the characters.  It's funny what some people believed back then.  I'm sure the same thing could be said for modern superstitions, but I found nearly all of them to be way out there.

Tom Sawyer is written in the third person and is, as one would expect, all about the adventures of its title character.  I found Tom to be quite a likable child.  Sure, he's a bad-ass kid, but he still has a certain innocence about him.  He's also got a very quick wit and a very active imagination, which makes him more endearing.  His adventures range from trivial and strictly imaginative, to quite heavy with large implications for other people.  The book made me question several times how he would handle the mess he got himself into and stayed enjoyable to the end.

Huckleberry Finn is written in the first person, from Huck's perspective.  Huck's language isn't as easy to read as the narrator in Tom Sawyer (identified in this book as Mark Twain, himself).  I feel like Twain also paid more attention to the regional dialects of the characters.  As a result, some of the characters' speech is somewhat hard to follow.  That doesn't prevent the book from being enjoyable, however.

I should point out that I was forced to read Huck Finn during my sophomore year of high school.  As with all assigned reading back then, I resented it, and didn't care for anything that I read.  Huck Finn was far from the worst assigned reading, but I don't remember enjoying it either.  As a matter of fact, I didn't remember much of anything about it at all.  That probably helped me enjoy it this time around (as if I were reading it for the first time).

Huck Finn starts off where Tom Sawyer left off.  It's more than just Huck's adventures, though.  It is also about his thoughts.  He was born into a society where slaves were owned and blacks were thought of as inferior people.  These are views shared by Huck.  This causes an internal conflict when he begins his adventure down the Mississippi with a runaway slave.  He feels bad for helping the man escape, yet doesn't have the heart to turn him in.  I found it interesting how Huck handled all the situations he found himself in during his journey.

I do want to point out that I think some sections of Huckleberry Finn were missing.  There were a couple of places that had very strange transitions.  After each one, I became very confused and had to read and re-read the sections following the transition, as well as the transitions themselves to try and make sense of them (and I still couldn't).  This is most likely a result of when the books were transcribed for the (free) Kindle edition of the book.

These books are recommended.

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The Legends of King Arthur and His Knights by Sir James Knowles

What do you think of when you think of King Arthur?

• Merlin?
• Camelot?
• Round Tables?
• A sword in a stone?
• Killer rabbits?
• Excalibur and a lady in a lake?
• Love affairs?
• The Holy Grail?
• So many Knights and Kings that it's basically impossible to keep them all straight?
• So much smiting (on the left, and the right)?
• The Knights who say Ni?
• Legendary adventures, such as King Arthur becoming the emperor of Rome?

All of those things, except a few, are in this book.  It sounds pretty good, in theory, but it's actually a very hard read.  These legends are old.  Really old.  And this book is basically a compilation of all the different legends placed more or less in chronological order.  They are different stories, though, and there is no continuous plot between them.  Because of its age, it's written in a very different English than that of today, making it hard to read.  It also name drops so many kings and knights that I stopped caring who was who.  Doing so just makes it even more confusing, I'm sure.  For instance, some characters show up in some of the later stories that I could have sworn were killed in earlier stories. Maybe they weren't really the same character.  There's just too many names to keep track of.

If you're really interested in these stories, I would encourage you to read them.  However, since it's a pretty hard read, and not horribly entertaining, I can't really recommend it in general.

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The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells

Let me start off with a quote, "The creature had exactly the mild but repulsive features of a sloth..."  Let me stop right there.  He just called sloths repulsive!  WTF is wrong with this guy?  He's calling this gentle creature repulsive:

These animals:

As you can see, they are far from repulsive.  I can't recommend this book for that reason alone.  In all seriousness, while I think that I should have found this book a somewhat interesting read, I just didn't.  I didn't care about the characters, the animals, or the plot.  It was empty reading.  In the book, Dr. Moreau creates hideous monstrosities of men out of animals.  Unlike in the Island of Dr. Hibbert, Moreau isn't creating these ban-beasts out of people, he's making them out of animals exclusively.  It's a horrible thing to do, but it doesn't get me caring.  Of course, eventually one of the tortured animals goes crazy, which leads to all the animals going crazy.  Not even this added danger to the human characters interested me, since I didn't care about any of them.

So, not recommended for multiple reasons, but mostly because he insulted sloths.

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Lair of the White Worm by Bram Stoker

So, I was playing some poker the other day (not really), and the first card on the table ended up being the race card.  Any time that card shows up, you have to wonder who it's being played against.  In this instance, I think it might have been Bram Stoker.

I've read plenty of books with racist characters in them before.  I really expect that sort of thing in older books.  Racism and sexism was kinda the norm back in the day, sadly.  Anyway, I don't think I had ever read a book where the 3rd person narrator seemed a bit racist.  Did the character from Africa really have to be a "devil of a man?" (that's not a real quote, btw)  The narrator also use the n-word quite a few times.  I know it was the 19th century, and that was probably common language back then, and I'm probably just reading too much into it, but it was a bit jarring.  Of course, the main character's 200 some-odd racist bones didn't bother me so much.

But enough about the dreaded race card, what about the rest of the book?

It was a little interesting.  A guy moves from Australia to be near is elderly and childless uncle.  He becomes friends with one of his uncle's friends who studies the various myths and legends of England.  There's a monster (a white wormy thing) that was supposed to have lived in that area.  And with that, you got a bit of the set up.

The way it plays out doesn't actually make a lot of sense to me.  There's entire chapters that seemed to have pretty much no point at all with regards to the greater story.  After having finished the book, I have got to say that they had pretty much no point at all with regards to the greater story.  There's just a whole lot there that doesn't really go anywhere.  For instance, there's a chapter or so talking about how the area became swarming with birds that just wouldn't go away.  No reason is given as to why they're there.  They do become a very big problem for the comunity, which leads to the local duke, prince, or whatever (I'll pretend that duke is correct) to create a kite shaped like a hawk to scare them all away.  If I remember correctly, the book dedicates several more chapters to the duke's obsession with his kite.  Admittedly, the kite is slightly significant to the story, as it relates to the all-too-convenient ending.  I was really wondering how the story was going to resolve itself in the few pages that were remaining and then BANG, it just kinda ended in a nice pretty package.

It's okay, but not great.  I can't recommend it.

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Beauty and the Beast by Marie Le Prince de Beaumont

This short story is pretty much the story you expect it to be.  A young girl named Beauty meats a young beast name Beast and one thing leads to another....

Well anyway, it's not a bad story.  It's not a great story either.  It's really short, though, which is why I don't have much to say about it.

If you have a little bit of time to kill, you can do worse than reading this story.  Somewhat recommended.

A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne

Let me start by talking a little about the Professor.  He's not character writing the story, but he's the one who wanted to go on the journey.  He's a very learned man of science, but seems a little too eager to take all sorts of matters on faith.  He took it on faith that the temperature wasn't going to get much hotter closer to the center of the Earth.  He took it on faith that they would find plenty of fresh water under the Earth.  Maybe he's just so knowledgeable that he knows what to expect, but I don't know how he could be.  He never explains why he thinks the things he does.  Since these things run counter to logic, or at least the logic of the narrator, some explanation would have been nice.

The book itself was fairly interesting through a good chunk of it.  Not a lot happens for a long while, but I didn't really mind.  It is a bit science heavy, particularly geology, which makes sense, since the characters are men of science.  I took some geology in college, but a lot of the stuff still went way over my head.  Toward the end of the book, it seemed like Jules Verne was running out of ideas, and didn't really have a resolution planned out.  The last few chapters just made me think, "Really?"

If you're a science-y type person, then you might enjoy this book.

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The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

This book has it all: sword duels, adultery, war, political intrigue, adultery, religious commentary, murder, adventure, camaraderie, adultery, romance, lies, royalty, lust, and, did I mention, adultery?  I don't think there's a single female character who is faithful to her husband in this book.  That being said, none of them are portrayed in a negative fashion for their infidelities.  It's not really even considered a character trait of note.  The Three Musketeers (and d'Artagnan) are courting these women, some of whom happen to be married.  The husbands are treated more as obstacles than a moral dilemma.

Here's what you need to know about this book:

The King of France counts two people as his most trusted advisers.  The Cardinal, and the captain of the Musketeers.

The Queen of France is in love with the Duke of Buckingham.  He loves her in return.

The Musketeers are loyal to the King and Queen.  They server as the King's bodyguards and are basically elite soldiers. They also frequently get into scuffles with the Cardinal's guards.  There's a bit of a not-quite-friendly rivalry between the two groups.

The Cardinal wants to discredit the Queen of France.  I don't actually remember why.  He's basically the villain of the book, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have the King's, or France's, interests at heart.  His actions just go against the interests of the protagonists.

d'Artagnan, is a very impulsive young man who wants to become a Musketeer who frequently gets himself into trouble.  He serves as the main character of the story.  Somewhere along the way, he falls in love with one of the Queen's servants who is helping her and the Duke of Buckingham hook up.  This lady gets abducted by the Cardinal and d'Artagnan is highly motivated to find this woman and do some hooking up of his own.  He serves as the book's main protagonist.

The Three Musketeers are d'Artagnan's friends and help him get out of the trouble he gets himself into.  They also help him in his quest to help his lady-friend.

Now, I'm not a fan of the writing style.  It's written in the first person by a narrator who has no relationship to the characters or events.  It's also written in a conversational style that kinda gets on my nerves from time to time.  All in all, though,  I did find the book interesting throughout.

This is one book that I do recommend.

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