The more I read this, the more I regret not having read it when I was younger. Had I done so I might have enjoyed it more than I do now, as now it just feels so cliched. I know that's unfair given how many of those clichés are traceable to Stevenson's novel, but it doesn't make my sense of it any less acute.

Success! One of the local used bookstores in my area just reopened for its customers, so I decided to pay it a visit. Not only did they have copies of Treasure Island, but they even had one in the Signet edition! Naturally I snapped it up in a heartbeat.

Life is just better with real books.

This morning I had a talk with my son about the summer. Normally he would be attending summer school for the majority of his day, but as we don't live in normal times he is spending the summer indoors chafing under our recently imposed screen time limits because without them he would develop bedsores from long-term sofa occupation. Bad parent that I am, though, I've never taught him how to entertain himself, which is why he spent much of the past week complaining about having nothing to do with his summer of free time.

Hence our conversation. During it, I realized that one of the things he missed was the structure of school, with work punctuated by free time. Because of this, I decided to draw up some lessons to occupy his days. We're starting with Treasure Island, and as I've never read it until now I'm reading an online ebook copy while he listens to an audiobook version.

And this is how I discovered something else I don't like about ebooks, which is the absence of an ISBN for ebooks in the public domain. I decided to list the Signet Classics edition as I'm using an online teacher's guide to help me structure his assignment, but it still grates on me that I can't properly track my page progress.

This book appealed to me because the author seemed to have the same philosophy toward writing historical fiction as my own. Catherine Carey is a relatively minor character in Tudor era drama though she is closely related to larger players, just how closely is a subject for debate. The story is a intimately told personal story of love, family, and loyalty that focuses on Catherine and her children rather than the historical events of the day. Since she was born during the reign of Henry VIII, survived Edward VI and Mary I, and served Elizabeth I, Catherine has an interesting story to tell.

That being said, she is above all else a wife and mother. Catherine avoids most of the drama of the Tudor court, the major exception to this rule being when she and her husband find refuge with Protestants on the Continent during the reign of Queen Mary. This gives an interesting glimpse into the decisions that each family had to make during the religious unrest of the 16th century.

Catherine is submissive to her husband and loyal to Queen Elizabeth (no matter how horridly the virgin queen behaves), which causes her story to largely be the story of others and events that are beyond he control. Sometimes, this causes more telling than showing, but the reader is at the mercy of Catherine's limited point-of-view. The most emotive moments are when she births, cares for, and inevitably loses several of her fourteen children. While she yearns to simply raise her children, the demanding Queen Elizabeth frequently keeps Catherine away from her beloved family so that she can fulfill important duties such as caring for the royal pet monkey. Suffice it to say that Catherine had far more patience for the situations she was placed in than I would!

We are given glimpses of Catherine's daughter Lettice, who promises to have a more dramatic story. I wonder if the author will be carrying on with her.

I was pleased to find this book available through Kindle Unlimited.

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

 

I am in desperate need to get back on the writing wagon. I don't know why I've been so out of it this year, maybe it was graduating from my undergrad in May and immediately starting my graduate degree this week. Maybe it's something else that I can't think of at the moment, so I needed to get into the mind of a writer and read about her thoughts on writing.

Dillard intertwines her daily life and her writing life with ease, sweeping in and out of metaphors with incredible ease. Her thoughts on what writing is and how it impacts your life, how a novel takes years (not months) to be written and many other things resonated with me. However, I expected to find more writerly musings and fewer essays about her life in Washington state. It was easy for me to be distracted at certain points, even if she did paint a riveting picture of the mountains and the fury of Mother Nature.

Still, her wisdom on writing is solid and it's worth reading for that alone.