So my prevailing question through a lot of this novel was: is the most concentrated usage of pirate tropes, or, did this book invent all of those pirate tropes? And I think the answer is probably a little in the middle, but it’s interesting because this book feels like THE pirate book. And it’s kind of barely about pirates really. What I mean by this, is that this book more than anything else is a book about a mutiny. Yes, there’s a parrot who sings “Sixteen men on a dead man’s chest” and yes there’s a buried treasure quest and […]

Just as a number of readers before me have also done, I came to read Treasure Island after recently flying through the tv series Black Sails (I wasn’t sure about it at first, but I quickly came around and loved it by the end), which is a prequel to the classic novel by Robert Louis Stevenson. Although, I didn’t realize this for quite an embarrassingly long time, but then, all my previous engagement with the story has been in the form of The Muppets adaptation or Disney’s Treasure Planet: I thought it was just generic and well-known pirate names being […]