4.40

4

July 12, 2017

Yo Ho Ho & a Bottle of Rum

Believe it or not, I am 59 years old & had never read Treasure Island before. What an enjoyable book, made even more enjoyable by the wonderful narration!

All of the sayings & characters that I have heard for years finally come together in this book. Long John Silver & his parrot, "Yo Ho Ho & a bottle of Rum", 15 men on a dead man's chest.....the list goes on & one. I don't know why I waited so long to read it.

I don't know anything about sailing or a lot of the sailing terms that were used in the book, but it really doesn't matter. What matters is the descriptions of the characters, the trip, the adventure, the treasure. There was enough backstabbing, adventure, piracy and the like to entertain all, no matter their age.

The narrator does a great job, but it does take some getting used to his very English accent. However, the accents that are used are what makes the book so much fun to listen to! I was given an Audible version of this book by the narrator/publisher & chose to review it.

1

May 26, 2018

Things should be up front when they aren't the original text

This is abridged, I'd rather read the original, with translations like joules verne not reading the original is fine, but I'd like to know which translation, because some of them are notoriously bad.

1

June 16, 2019

Don't buy this!

I don't know how this thing was digitized but it doesn't make any sense as you read it. I bought this thinking it was a cheap version of Treasure Island and I would save a couple of bucks but I had to buy the penguin classic anyway because this is not an accurate copy of the book. For example; in the first pages it mentions a "sword reduce" ??? In the real version I saw that this is a "sword cut". "Sixteen men on the dead man's chest" from the original, came out as "sixteen men on a no longer living man's chest" I don't know how anyone could offer a book like this for sale, please don't waste your money like I did.

4

November 30, 2017

A Good Fiction Classic

A well-written tale that held my interest. I did not find it to be anything special though, just a good, well-written book but then it should be especially considering the author's high position in the literary ranks. It certainly stands above some of the other classics with which I have had issues. It was worth the read but definitely does not rank, in my opinion, as a must read unless you wish to become a novelist.

5

January 9, 2018

Classic

What's to say? It's a classic and at 64 years old I finally got around to reading it. I've seen the Disney movie several times, and just finished the "Black Sails" prequel on DVD, do it was time to read it. It's an easy read and I finished it in 3 sessions.

3

March 8, 2018

Big size book

This book is HUGE. It’s nearly 8x11”

1

December 16, 2018

Does not hold up

If you’ve read anything about real pirates or just have a shred of common sense this book will be deeply frustrating. I get it’s a classic and a lot of the modern pirate tropes started here, but wow did it stink. It was amusing until they got on the boat. Any real pirate would have killed Will and tortured the doctor until he gave up the map. The book would be far shorter and much more violent. Read Empire of Blue Water or Republic of Pirates instead, or the first half of To Rule the Waves if you are interested in pirates.

5

November 3, 2019

Classic

As always, love the classics! This escaped me as a child, so I had to remedy the error. Adventure abounds on Treasure Island.

5

October 31, 2019

Great Adventure Tale

I absolutely recommend this to anyone who wants a classic, yet still readable, adventure full of murders, double-crosses, and shady characters. You may want to have Google handy for some of the old-timey nautical terms, but don't let that keep you away from a bloody adventure where no one is safe.

5

October 18, 2019

Engaging

Fun, well-written, fast-paced, but balanced. The characters's descriptions are well-rounded. I wish it had a sequel. It's a shame it's so short.

5

October 10, 2019

A great read anytime

I really enjoy reading a number of books in the Amazon Classics editions.

4

September 11, 2019

Entertaining swashbuckling adventure, and one of the cornerstones of a genre

It was high time I read the original version of this classic -- I'd read an illustrated condensed version as a child, and seen two film adaptations that took considerable liberties with the material ("Muppet Treasure Island" and "Treasure Planet"), but still hadn't read the original. And having now done so, I can definitely see why it's a classic. Its prose may come across as a little stilted nowadays, but it's still a highly enjoyable tale with some delightfully complex characters, and it helped forge the path for many of the pirate stories we know and love today, including "Pirates of the Caribbean" itself.

Jim Hawkins has lived a fairly ordinary life as the son of innkeepers... and so when a pirate by the name of Billy Bones drops dead in the family's inn, leaving behind a treasure map and attracting a swarm of unsavory characters to said inn, it changes his life forever. Seeing the map as the call to adventure, he, along with a trusted doctor friend and a local squire, hires a ship and crew to sail to the island where the treasure is supposedly buried. But Bones left a cryptic message before his death -- "beware the one-legged man" -- and when the one-legged ship's cook proves to be treacherous, Jim and his friends find themselves not just hunting for treasure, but struggling to escape a bloodthirsty pirate crew with the greatest treasure of all... their lives.

Given that this book was written and published in the 1800s, it uses language and phrasing that seems awkward and stilted by today's standards, and may entail a trip to the dictionary a time or two in order to make sense of some of the terms used. Despite this, it's still a rollicking adventure story, one that's still entertaining over a hundred years later. And if some of it seems a little trope-heavy by today's standards... well, that's because it's one of the early pirate novels that helped build some of those tropes and themes, so what seems old and tired today was still fresh and new back then.

One thing that impressed me about "Treasure Island" was its surprisingly complex characters. Most of the main characters have believable flaws and strengths, multi-faceted personalities, and manage to be likable even if they can be jerks or act like idiots at times. Long John Silver, the villain, is a surprisingly complex villain, greedy and bloodthirsty but with a surprising amount of compassion and nobility as well. For people who think "Treasure Planet" softened this villain up too much... they were surprisingly true to the character in the book, believe it or not.

A highly enjoyable and entertaining novel, "Treasure Island" is work a little work at getting through some of the antiquated language. If you're only familiar with this story via an adaptation, or if you're a "Pirates" fan, you owe it to yourself to check this classic out.

3

September 28, 2019

interesting but iffy

it kept me wanting to read and see what happened so it was good but it was like a story told by a child. as children do it focused on the fun and dramatic without much towards structure, continuity, or clarity. there were small irritations like unnecessarily roundabout ways of saying things or adding unnecessary, or leaving out helpful, explanations. there were also bigger issues like being so confusing it became necessary to me to skip whole pages to get back to something coherent and the characters changing personalities to move the plot (i don't mean being two-faced, i mean like an excellent liar suddenly being a bad liar). Also it is of course an old book and certain things wouldn't, shouldn't, be said now. Lastly, i wanna say jim is neither clever nor manly, whatever the characters might say, he is only stupidly LUCKY. The book has something on nearly every page happen by extraordinary luck and I get the feeling if Jim had merely sat himself on his butt for the duration of the tale it still would have happened.

P.s. Disney did it better, i really wanna watch Treasure Planet now.

5

August 13, 2018

A good job of a "junior" version of this classic

It's been a few years, but I have read the original, and without quibbling over details, this is a faithful retelling, with appropriate illustrations. I do have to say that the depiction of Long John Silver could have made him look a little more deserving of suspicion, though he was, of course, a complex character and not an outright villain. The pictures are somewhat cartoony, but appropriately so, I think, for the 7-11 year old audience I consider this suitable for. 7 and most 8 year olds will generally need this read to them. If I had to guess at a lexile I would think in the neighborhood of 600.

1

February 17, 2018

Beware - color picture on cover is misleading - NC Wyeth paintings are fuzzy black and white mimieographs or worse.

it is unfortunate that the Wyeth illustrations are highlighted in the title then rendered in crappy black and why in this cheaply printing copy of a big. at $2.99 i would not have returned it but just got two of these. the only way to buy the real classics with NC Wyeth illustrations in color seems to be old used ones from $20 to $200. but for $7.99 i was hoping that 13 (plus or minus) pages could at least have been rendered in decent color... A PDF if better than these.TREASURE ISLAND: Illustrated by N.C. Wyeth

1

November 23, 2019

Terrible Edition

Formatting issues. Typos, Words bizarrely replaced with different words.

1

October 6, 2019

Too many typos

Read this once as a kid and was hoping to read it again for old times sake but was turned off by the typos. Must be at least ten to twenty a page. Almost impossible to read.

1

September 14, 2019

Not the real text--reads like a computer translation.

This is a defective version. It reads like a computer translation from a different language. It has "the brown old seaman with the saber reduce" instead of the original "the brown old seaman with the saber cut," and
"I consider him as if it had been the day past," where the original says, "I remember him as if it had been yesterday." Almost every sentence has phrases that hardly make sense. This should be removed from Amazon.

1

August 29, 2019

Not the book pictured

I was looking for the book type pictured with the order. This was a very ugly, old book that is not illustrated and is not a Great Classics for Children type book. It is a Windermere Reader.

1

June 23, 2019

20 page childrens book, not the novel

The description and info on this product is real sneaky. This is NOT Treasure Island, the novel by Robert Lewis Stevenson, as the product info suggests. This is a 20-page children's bedtime reader.

1

June 12, 2019

Book

I did not buy this book!

1

April 17, 2019

FRAUD

This seller is a fraud! I’m not the only one that has ordered ‘Treasure Island’ as seen in the photo and it’s not folio society. I got a children’s cheaply made copy bound with glue. Terrible fraud

1

February 18, 2019

Don't bother.

This is a classic story. However, I couldn't get thru the first chapter as the narrator is AWFUL!

2

December 12, 2018

It didn't prompt me to buy some very large magnifying glasses though.

The book is the perfect size... if you are Michu, "the smallest man in the world". Ugh. It didn't prompt me to buy some very large magnifying glasses though.

2

December 10, 2018

I don't think this is an authorized publication

I have know idea what kind of publication this is, there were repeated sentences and paragraphs, very odd.