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Title: The Second Jungle Book
Author: Rudyard Kipling
Number of Pages: ? (I read it from the Gutenberg Project). Maybe 150, printed?
Book Number/Goal: 2.5/12+
My Rating: 4.5/5
Kipling spent the early part of his childhood in India, then made repeated trips back in his adulthood. The First and Second Jungle Books use people and talking animals to tell moral short stories, each bracketed by a pair of poems. Mowgli--yes, the human child raised by wolves and romanticized by Disney--features in about half of these.
I have owned The Jungle Book for a long time and was thrilled to find the sequel on the Gutenberg Project (by the way, if you haven't looked into that yet, do it! There are so many fantastic books there). I love the way Kipling weaves India in, from tales about the natives--biased, of course, by his British colonial views, but fascinating--and the way he portrays the animals who mentor Mowgli., farTheir personalities are tied to their species, so that Kaa, far from being Disney's idiot snake who ties himself in knots, is actually a 200-year-old, intelligent plotter of a being who trains Mowgli in hunting apes and snake courtesy. These stories are wonderful enough on their own, but they're also good to look at if you're interested at all in India in colonial times.
Author: Rudyard Kipling
Number of Pages: ? (I read it from the Gutenberg Project). Maybe 150, printed?
Book Number/Goal: 2.5/12+
My Rating: 4.5/5
Kipling spent the early part of his childhood in India, then made repeated trips back in his adulthood. The First and Second Jungle Books use people and talking animals to tell moral short stories, each bracketed by a pair of poems. Mowgli--yes, the human child raised by wolves and romanticized by Disney--features in about half of these.
I have owned The Jungle Book for a long time and was thrilled to find the sequel on the Gutenberg Project (by the way, if you haven't looked into that yet, do it! There are so many fantastic books there). I love the way Kipling weaves India in, from tales about the natives--biased, of course, by his British colonial views, but fascinating--and the way he portrays the animals who mentor Mowgli., farTheir personalities are tied to their species, so that Kaa, far from being Disney's idiot snake who ties himself in knots, is actually a 200-year-old, intelligent plotter of a being who trains Mowgli in hunting apes and snake courtesy. These stories are wonderful enough on their own, but they're also good to look at if you're interested at all in India in colonial times.
