School’s almost out. Holidays. Time to read for fun. Many entertaining classics suit both adults and adolescents, and lead readers into vast domains of literary entertainment. Herewith, some suggestions.
Treasure Island. “Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest – Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.” Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jim, Flint, and Long John Silver remain popular (there have been twenty or more movie versions). Fictional and factual riffs on piracy, in print and on screen (from Errol Flynn’s Captain Blood to Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow) continue to entertain.
The Telltale Heart. “…very, very dreadfully nervous I have been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” Edgar Allan Poe’s stories define the horror genre. Today, sophisticated high school students favor the work of H P Lovecraft: The Call of Cthulhu has engendered all sorts of spin-offs, including computer games. Stephen King is our home-grown provider: sometimes the horror is local, set in Maine.
Of course there’s also the more realistic horror of political and social dystopia: George Orwell’s fable of Animal Farm, followed by 1984; Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World; Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Less well known but equally horrific is Sinclair Lewis’s image of a fascist United States, It Can’t Happen Here.
Some of the above works might alternatively be classified as sci fi. Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea reminds us that science fiction and science fact have always been intertwined. The first nuclear submarine bore the name of Captain Nemo’s fictional Nautilus, and performed many of the same feats. Isaac Asimov wrote very readable sci fi and sci fact. Dava Sobel keeps us readably up-to-date on the real stuff.
“Come, Watson, come!…The game is afoot.” Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes launched an ever-growing industry: start with some short stories; move on to The Hound of the Baskervilles. The paths of crime fiction lead in many interesting directions, but they all begin in Victorian London, at 221b Baker Street. The paths include police procedurals, women detectives, amateur detectives, animal detectives, culinary detectives, espionage, historical crime, hard-boiled detectives…
A Christmas Carol. “Merry Christmas, every one.” Tis the season.
David R Jones reads a good deal of crime fiction. He used to review it for The Australian newspaper.
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