EBooks, Inc.

Found a bunch more e-books of old children's/young adult fiction on Blackmask Online, including things like "The Outdoor Girls" and "The Motor Girls"--they had Tom Swift, too, but I left those for later--and also some other of Kate Douglas Wiggin's and Eleanor Porter's novels.

At the moment I am reading in e-book format Jules Verne's In Search of the Castaways, which I loved as a Disney film. Of course it has been "Readers Digest condensed" for Disney and tweaked to provide a showcase for Hayley Mills, as the Mary Grant novel character so far has done nothing but stay on shipboard and fall in love with the ship's captain. (The novel's Jacques Paganel is also younger, as opposed to Maurice Chevalier's aged sage in the Disney flick.)

The one thing that has amused me reading the book is remembering a movie critic's scathing comment when the Disney movie came out that "they spend the first half of the movie having improbably adventures in South America and then suddenly realize that they are on the wrong continent altogether," blaming this defect on bad moviemaking by Disney. I assure that long ago critic, if he is still alive, that this wasn't Disney, but pure Verne! The travelers do indeed spend the first part of the book wandering South America having misinterpreted Captain Grant's message, and while they do not have a "toboggan ride on a rock" down the mountain after the earthquake (another thing the critic made fun of), the company does survive an even more "improbable" vicious landslide (and Robert does indeed get carried off by a condor!). Blame Disney if you must for toning down the violence of the landslide, but render unto Verne what is Verne's!

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 11:01:00 AM

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