The Jungle Book

Children will delight in this unabridged version of Rudyard Kipling’s classics, Jungle Books One and Two! Not only does this attractive volume feature the beloved tales of Mowgli, the "man cub” raised by wolves, and Rikki Tikki Tavi, but also the lesser-known but wonderful stories of Toomai, the boy who gets to see elephants dance; Quiquern, who saves his Eskimo people from starvation; and Kotick, the white seal.

OK, the description on the book that I actually read is lame, so here is another one that I like better...

The Jungle Books can be regarded as classic stories told by an adult to children. But they also constitute a complex literary work of art in which the whole of Kipling's philosophy of life is expressed in miniature. They are best known for the 'Mowgli' stories; the tale of a baby abandoned and brought up by wolves, educated in the ways and secrets of the jungle by Kaa the python, Baloo the bear, and Bagheera the black panther. The stories, a mixture of fantasy, myth, and magic, are underpinned by Kipling's abiding preoccupation with the theme of self-discovery, and the nature of the 'Law'


Much Better...

OK, anyone that follows me on goodreads (if you don't and would like to, you can find my account HERE... or at least I think you can... let me know if the link doesn't work, m'kay?), you may have noticed that I have had The Jungle Book on my Currently Reading shelf since just after Xmas. There is a bit of a story behind this, it did not just take me 9 months to read something that is generally classified as a Children's book... I actually bought this for Brayden for Xmas hoping that he and I could read it outloud before bed to get him more into reading. I figured this was a good one because we could then watch the Disney movie after we finished, but there was a big flaw with this plan: I don't like the concept of "abridged" versions of books. I think they are a waste of paper. If you want to read a book, read it how it was written, not some lame-ass synopsis. So I bought him an unabridged copy. The problem is that it has that late 19th century lingo to deal with that is not really supportive of a struggling reader. All the "Thus"es and "Thee"s, and "Thou"s really threw Brayden off, and we spent more time talking about what everything meant rather than keeping to the story. You learn as a teacher that the general rule for kids reading books is that if you flip open to a random page and there are 5 words that you don't know on that single page, then the book is too hard for you. So this book was WAY too hard for Brayden. And the annoying thing is that this was in the Young Readers section, so I thought I was buying a book below his reading level. Perhaps the abridged copies would have been, but this one was definitely not. So less than 50 pages in, he gave up. I can totally understand that. I meant for this to be a fun thing we could do together, instead it became a frustrating chore for him. I had no problem explaining everything to him, but often we would only get through a page or two in an evening (Rosalie still wasn't sleeping well back then), and he had difficulty remembering things that had happened in the story previously because we had read them seveal days before. I hoped for a while that we would eventually come back to it and try again, but I lost that hope a while ago.

So given that I had no issues with the language personally, and I was looking to fluff up my book count on goodreads, I figured I might as well finish reading it. It is a classic afterall, and it's meant to be a kid's book, so I figured it would be fun. And it was! One thing I hadn't realized prior to starting it with Brayden, is that it's more a series of short stories instead of a novel. And not all of those short stories are about Mowgli, Baloo, and Bahgeera, although all of them involved animals in one way or another. One particular story called "The White Seal" really stuck out for me, because I recognized the story without having ever read it before about half way through the story, I realized that I had seen a movie or a short about this very story! I was sure this was an 80s Disney procuction, but with a little bit of research I discovered that it was actually made in 1975, and was made by Chuck Jones, who also made Loony Tunes. (Just FYI, I thought this was a bit strange because Disney had made the Jungle Book in 1967, so you would think that they would also have had the rights to The White Seal...). 

(NOTE: This is only part 1 of the film, there is a complete version on YouTube, but it wouldn't let me post that one)

I found the Mowgli stories far more entertaining than many of the other stories in the two books (Just to clarify, the edition I bought for Brayden was both The Jungle Book, and The Second Jungle Book). Some of them I would go as far to say that they are downright boring, however generally there was only one non-Mowgli story for every 2 or so Mowgli stories. So that was alright.

On a slight tangent and side note, I also feel like reading this book has made me want to go back and read Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, which is a book based on The Jungle Book, but it takes place in a Graveyard instead, with Vampires, Witches, and Ghosts as the main character's peers rather than the jungle animals. I think I would have appriciated it more when I read it the first time and I read The Jungle Book first, but I hadn't realized until I was midway through. I think a re-read may be in order to get a deeper appriciation for The Graveyard Book.