Stroke – DaneCobain.com

Robert Louis Stevenson – Treasure Island | Review

Title: Treasure Island

Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 203

Rating: 3.5/5

Robert Louis Stevenson – Treasure Island

I picked this up thinking that back when I was a child, I’d tried to read it and I’d given up on it. It turns out I was wrong, because I’m pretty sure that I read the entire thing from cover to cover. Parts of the story kept coming back to me just before they happened, and not just because I used to love Muppet Treasure Island when I was a kid.

All in all, I thought the book was pretty good, even though it slowed down a little towards the end, and I do think it deserves its place in the history of literature. It’s not necessarily my favourite classic, but I’m glad that I’ve ticked it off and I can move on to something else. Something like Kidnapped, perhaps, which is also written by Stevenson and which I already own a copy of.

And in the meantime, I enjoyed little bits like when the doctor cut open someone’s vein to help them to recover after having a stroke. That gave it an extra, interesting edge as a modern reader. So yeah.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Click here to buy Treasure Island.

Irvine Welsh – Ecstasy | Review

Title: Ecstasy

Author: Irvine Welsh

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 290

Rating: 8/10

Irvine Welsh – Ecstasy

What we have here is a collection of three novella-length stories by Irvine Welsh, the master of drug-induced debauchery and the Scottish icon who wrote Trainspotting, amongst other things. I’m actually a huge fan of Welsh’s, and this is the eighth Irvine Welsh book that I’ve finished, with two more on my ‘to be read‘ pile, and I can safely say that this is Welsh at his best.

The three stories, dubbed “tales of chemical romance”, are classified further as Lorraine Goes to Livingston (A Rave and Regency Romance), Fortune’s Always Hiding (A Corporate Drug Romance) and The Undefeated (An Acid House Romance), and boy are they crackers.

The Undefeated is featured on the book’s blurb, a story about a man and a woman who fall in love in the backstreets of Edinburgh, but I thought it was the weakest of the three. Lorraine Goes to Livingston includes a writer who has a stroke, her perverted partner, an erotic novel and a man who has sex with corpses.

Irvine Welsh

Fortune’s Always Hiding, which was my favourite of the three, followed the exploits of a young man who falls in love with a woman who has no arms, a victim of the drug ‘Tenazedrine‘, which is based upon the real-life drug Thalidomide. I won’t reveal the ending, because it was epic – suffice to say you need to read it.

That is, you need to read it if you like to read about the darker sides of human existence – if you’re used to romance novels, it might be best to steer clear. It’s all about MDMA and anal sex, not rainbows and unicorns – it’s Irvine Welsh.