Dr. Jeykll and Mr. Hyde

I picked up The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in an awesomely tatty used bookstore in West Portal. Who knew it was by Robert Louis Stevenson ? (Kidnapped, Treasure Island) I have one major complaint about the book: Too Short! It's barely eighty or so smallish pages, which is a shame because the prose is sometimes nothing short of resplendant, such as these lines from the first couple pages:

He was austere with himself; drank gin when he was alone, to mortify a taste for vintages.

..

His friends were those of his own blood, or those whom he had known the longest; his affections, like ivy, were the growth of time, they implied no aptness in the object.

- Hot hot hot!

(These were perhaps the best lines in the book, but the rest is nearly as good)

Anyhow, it's a fine book. If you've read The Portrait of Dorian Grey you'll be very at home with Jekyll & Hyde, it's essentially the same story, written five years earlier (1886). What was up in victorian england with all this obsession over living a double life of moral bankruptcy while sneakily having a seperate copy of yourself pay the piper ?


Am still enjoying Norwegian Wood. It's sort of like classical music.

Read the first couple pages of Huckleberry Finn, and my mouth is *watering*. But i've promised myself to finish norwegian wood before that dessert.