Recently I was thinking back to the 1980\u2019s Disney movie based on this book, and so I downloaded it and enjoyed it now as much as I remember enjoying it as a kid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This book takes a hard look at the innocence of kids, and examines what makes men bad or good. There is a lot of philosophy here – mainly in one character\u2019s speech while thinking through things in the town library – but it felt sort of forced to me. There is some great setup of some spooky situations, and a couple of scenes that weren\u2019t in the movie. Also some scenes from the movie weren\u2019t like the book, and it pleasant to discover these points as a reward for digging deeper into the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The book is written in a folksy tone, maybe deliberately, but some of the old idioms and expressions caught me by surprise. There are odd generalizations (\u201cwomen love gossip\u201d, bad kids throw dead cats down neighbor\u2019s chimneys) that maybe resonated better fifty years ago. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Overall the story is solid and was worth reading, but just felt a little outdated in some parts. I\u2019ve read plenty of older books that didn\u2019t feel outdated – maybe it was because they depended less on phrases and idioms popular at the time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Next I\u2019m reading Hooked by Michael Moss.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Recently I was thinking back to the 1980\u2019s Disney movie based on this book, and so I downloaded it and enjoyed it now as much as I remember enjoying it as a kid. This book takes a hard look at the innocence of kids, and examines what makes men bad or good. There is a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-3419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-T9","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3419"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3419\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}