One of my booktube channels devoted to the classics had a video on ten summer reads. I picked one of those ten, one old enough to be in the public domain and available on Gutenberg. I should mention that I watched and read this book in May... We'll have to see if I try any other other nine summer reading suggestions.
My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
Kim By Rudyard Kipling B+
As you can see from its score, I enjoyed Kim. It probably just missed an A- because I thought it ending was slightly unsatisfying. I guess Kipling did wrap things up, and it is one of those life goes on endings, but still, I would've liked to know a little more at the ending point. The other slight ding, in my view, was that his descriptions were often very colorful, but dense. Being written in 1901, it was written in the style of the period. Still, as I recently wrote about the yin and yang of writing, and how important I thought visual white space was, the long dense blocks of description might have read better for me, it they had been strung out and flowed like a stream rather than a lake to make them a little less tiring to push through.
Seeing that it is a well known story, I won't say more than that Kim, an orphan of an English soldier grows up in the streets of Lahore India. Clever, daring, cheerful, resourceful, well liked by all, he becomes an aide and disciple of a Tibetan abbot on a pilgrimage, and then a trainee in the intelligence department of the British Army. The story ends after his first assignment as a new, novice agent. We are introduced to many colorful characters along the way.
I find stories set in India of the 19th century captivating. No fantasy novel can be more colorful or fantastic than India of any period, with it mix of peoples, cultures, religions, and kingdoms. Born in India, and spending years there, Kipling knew of what he wrote about and could paint each scene in the book with authentic details and color.
I have, however, read a number of other Rudyard Kipling stories. I have a 627 page one volume edition The Works of Rudyard Kipling that includes short stories and verses all I believe set in India. as well as and 1898 edition of The Day's Work, of 12 short stories. I will have to investigate them more closely, as I am certain I did not read either cover to cover, or if I did, they are out of memory.
