I really liked it
Thinking back, I could’ve saved this book for October or something—Halloween weekend—but sometimes you don’t think of that until later.
Read: April 13 – April 16, 2024
Audience: General
Book contains: supernatural, crime, murder, ghosts
Purchase a copy from Amazon.ca
I found readalongs of these stories in multiple sources, though mostly on YouTube. Some of the stories I just read normally.
I absolutely adored The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in this book. Some of the other tales held my attention less, but they were all still quite intriguing. They gave me a new perspective of that time period for an American, rather than the usual British authors I’ve read before.
The first story as Roscoe, and if it had set the tone for the rest of the book, I wouldn’t have liked it as much. Roscoe was more essay than story, and didn’t make such a clear picture in my mind’s eye.
I’m not sure what I was expecting from Rip Van Winkle, but the time traveling story that we got wasn’t it. It was very peculiar. I loved the idea of that question: What would happen if you went to sleep one day and woke up twenty years later? How much would change?
The Mutability of Literature was another essay, in which the narrator visits a library and has a philosophical discussion with a book about how some books rise and fall in popularity, and other books become immortal. It listed a bunch of authors I’ve never heard of and now have to look up.
The Spectre Bridegroom is a tale of love, but also a tale of misunderstanding. There is no actual ghost, though the bridegroom dies the day he is intended to marry and shows up at the party anyway. I love that this ended in a happy marriage for the young couple.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is everything I expected and more. I knew snippets of this story, and I was pleasantly surprised by how wonderful the descriptions and imagery were. Irving did so well at setting the scene and the tone every time.
The Student of Salamanca was by far the longest story in this book, and since I had no accompanying reader, it felt like it took forever to get through. The story was okay, but not my favourite of the bunch. It follows a young student who becomes apprenticed to an alchemist and falls in love with the alchemist’s daughter; he later must save them from execution for witchcraft due to a jealous lover.
The Adventure of my Uncle is the start of a collection of ghost stories told between a group of friends. The narrator’s uncle once visited a castle and saw a ghost in the night, only later discovering the story of the woman whose spirit he saw. The story ends without a feasible conclusion, as stories like this often do.
The Adventure of my Aunt comes after the story of the uncle, told by a different narrator in the group of friends. This man tells of his aunt, who, shortly after her husband passed, has an encounter with a haunted portrait of him. I thought it was spooky; the ending also made me laugh.
The Adventure of the German Student, yet another ghost story, is told by a third friend about a German student he visited in France. This student shared his story of meeting and marrying a beautiful young lady, only to later discover that she’d been killed by the guillotine the day before. He’d met and married a ghost! This was somewhat of a humorous story.
The Adventure of the Mysterious Stranger, the fourth in this line, is told by yet another narrator, about his time living in Venice, where he met and befriended a mysterious stranger who was constantly going out to social events and parties, and yet had the most depressed disposition. After a long time of friendship, this man disappears, leaving nothing but a note. The narrator never saw the man again.
The Story of the Young Italian is directly following the one of the mysterious stranger. The stranger is the Italian, and this story is what was written in the letter for the narrator, telling him about his past and how they met.
Kidd the Pirate was very fun! I haven’t read a lot of pirate stories, but I really liked this one. The next three stories even play off this one, as they refer to the buried treasure Kidd supposedly left behind when he was executed in Boston.
Tom Walker and the Devil is a story about a miser who makes a deal with the devil, and then pays the ultimate price for it. It’s a tale about greed and its consequences, and I especially liked the artwork on the audiobook video I found.
Wolfert Webber, or Golden Dreams carries another lesson about greed—and about throwing away what you have for what you might get. Sometimes risks are worth it, and other times, like in this story, they lead to your ruin. The whole thing stems from the tale of Kidd’s buried treasure, and honestly, I kind of feel bad for Wolfert, even if it was his own fault.
The Legend of Don Munio Sancho de Hinojosa is the final story in this book, but not the last of Irving’s works by far. It’s a short tale about a cavalier: a Spanish knight by the name of Don Munio Sancho de Hinojosa. In this story is the tragic end of the knight by the unknowing blade of a man he’d previously hosted in his castle. Distraught to have felled the man he knew, the killer brought the knight’s body back to his widow. Quite a heart-touching story.
Some of the stories were spooky as I expected, and others were less so. Some were nice and short, others felt like they dragged on forever. Overall, I’m really glad I read it, and I kind of want to find more of Washington Irving’s works to read.
If you like spooky stories, definitely check out The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and if you enjoy Irving’s writing style, the rest of his works are great to try.
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Dracula by Bram Stoker
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