Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
August 18th, 2006Brothers and sisters, I know it’s summertime and that some of us have been indulging in guilty light movie-watching. Some like myself probably went as low as to set their hearts on ‘Pirates of the Caribbean - Dead Man’s Chest’. Allow me to suggest a painless way to redemption: read or re-read Stevenson’s ‘Treasure Island’, lest you should die thinking ‘Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!’ or the ‘black spot’ are inventions from a 2006 Gore Verbinski movie produced by Walt Disney Pictures. Alternatively, reading it to your kids as a serialized bedtime story would still be valid as a redemption — it may even earn you some advance.
Those brothers and sisters who went to see that entertaining yet sinful flick with their non-English-speaking families, and watched it dubbed in a language other than Mr Depp’s, I would heartily nudge towards reading the book in English.
Being too poor, or — like myself — too parsimonious to spend less than a dollar on a secondhand paperback, or too weak or lazy to walk or cycle over to the next public library, is no excuse: as it has long been copyright-free, this book can be downloaded free from the internet. If like me you do not mind on-screen reading, this is the cheapest redemption — if you omit the cost of the LCD beamer you’ve installed in your bedroom to read your ebooks on the ceiling while you lie in bed.
Post-scriptum
I have not read all buccaneering books there are to read, and therefore certainly did not catch all references to sea literature in the film — apart from the Flying Dutchman, which to me is only an opera by Richard Wagner. If you believe you can pinpoint other allusions to books worthy of our reading time, please come forward in the comments.
Read on
Ban acronyms
Reading Proust as if he was a blogger
Read away
R.L. Stevenson’s ‘Treasure Island’ from the Gutenberg Project