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.

Great performance,  meh story. I love pirates, adventure, historical settings, classics, and full cast performances. This story had all of that, yet it didn't entertain me like I hoped/expected.

I couldn't get into it, even with the very excellent voice cast carrying me through the tale. I suspect this just isn't the story for me, or perhaps it's one of those "must re-read later" kind of books.

All-in-all, not bad, just not great.

If I read this in childhood - and it would have been in a children's abridged edition, I should think - it didn't leave any memory of its rather gory plot, nor of the curious moral ambiguity of it principal villain, Long John Silver.

Nonetheless, once it got going, it was more or less what I expected: an adventure story featuring a young man with more courage than sense. The abrupt change out of his first-person narrative to another point of view for parts of the plot took me by surprise a bit - but frankly, that would never have bothered me in the slightest if I'd read it when I was younger.

The e-version I read the story in was rather bad. Each page of the first 100 or so was interrupted by an illustration having nothing to do with the text (mostly the same scene of pioneer America, repeated over and over). No-one had bothered to supply the missing first letters of opening words in each chapter (likely decorative initials in the scanned original.) The file is entitled "Complete Works of R.L. Stevenson", but it contains exactly 3 of his most famous novels - probably volume 1 of a collected edition.

And all this notwithstanding, I enjoyed reading this missing piece from my childhood. It was clear, straightforward, vivid storytelling.