It’s difficult for me to believe that I never read Kidnapped as a youth. I mean, I read quite a bit of Robert Louis Stevenson. Treasure Island, of course, and Jekyll and Hyde, but also the short stories in The New Arabian Nights. I particularly remember enjoying the Suicide Club stories. Later, I read The Master of Ballantrae and of course The Wrong Box, but at some point in my pre-teen or teen years I was very much a fan, and Kidnapped is just the thing for a kid like that.
And yet, there was nothing about the book whatsoever that seemed the slightest bit familiar. Nothing. Not the plot, not the characters, not the odd bit of phrasing or passing joke, nothing. So my guess is that I never read it.
Until recently, I mean. When I picked it off my shelf to reread in the tub, and found it so unfamiliar.
I wonder what else I think I read that I didn’t…
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.