Treasure Island

This reconsideration of "Treasure Island" can scarcely be called a rediscovery, because "Treasure Island" has never been lost. Still, it is now 125 years old, and it has been more than half a century since I first read it. Even the best and most beloved of books lose some of their steam over the years, as their stories become universally familiar and as their language gradually comes to seem dated and stilted.

. . .A rereading of Stevenson's novel after all those years says nothing to me so much as that good books -- and "Treasure Island" is a very good book -- really have lives of their own, entirely apart from movies and other adaptations of them. Some of the adaptations of the book are very good, but none is as good as the book itself. "Treasure Island" is a genuine classic that still somehow retains its power to surprise, to amuse and -- even though we all know how it ends -- to raise the reader's blood pressure.

Over the years "Treasure Island" (by Robert Louis frequently has been pigeonholed, and dismissed, as a book for boys. To be sure, Stevenson had boys in mind as he wrote it, but many girls have gotten great pleasure out of it and so, for that matter, have many adults, this one included. If we insist on literary categorization, then someone really must invent a category into which could be fit all those books -- Booth Tarkington's "Penrod" novels, Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer," Johanna Spyri's "Heidi" -- that are routinely filed in the children's section yet are often read by adults, and for that matter all those books that are rated "adult" yet can, and should, be read by children of a certain age: Russell Baker's "Growing Up," Richard Wright's "Native Son," Stevenson's "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."

A century and a quarter after its publication, "Treasure Island" apparently still is finding plenty of readers. Many different editions of it are available, some (like the Penguin) with scholarly apparatus and appendices, others unadorned and aimed, obviously, at younger readers. This reader, no spring chicken, has no doubt that they will enjoy it as much as he did when he was their age -- and that their parents will, too.

from Stevenson's 'Treasure Island': Still Avast Delight
By Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post (Monday, April 17, 2006)