The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
Post number thirty-one is for Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. This book was another of the reading requirements for my History of Children's Literature course (seems like all I do is read for classes anymore!), and while I was only assigned three of the Mowgli stories and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, I decided to read the entire book, as it was a fast read and I was rather enjoying the stories. I think this particular version of The Jungle Book is different than most, though, because there were some stories included in this version that weren't included on Project Guttenberg or on LibriVox, which I used to listen to the audiobook version of a few of the tales.
Brief spoilers follow.
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I was only familiar with this book because of the Disney film (both the animated one and the live action one), so was surprised at how different some of the things were. I don't know WHY I was surprised, as I am well aware of what book-to-screen adaptations usually mean, but there it is. Mowgli was actually much older – seventeen, according to "The Spring Running" – in the book when he finally left the jungle than when he did in the film. (Unless the animated film was using his first trip back to the "Man Village", although I doubt this since they added the girl with the water, whom Mowgli sees in "The Spring Running".) There was a lot more detail about his relationship with Shere Khan, and how exactly he was accepted by the wolves, but of course, books usually do have more details than films.
Favorite stories of the bunch were probably "Kaa's Hunting" (this is one of my favorite scenes in the animated version as well, although it is much MUCH different from the book) and "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi"; I love that little mongoose. <3
All in all, this was a fun week of assigned readings. The last several weeks have been a lot of fun, actually, in terms of the actual books we've been reading, so hopefully that will continue!
Read and Reviewed 