Good evening and welcome to the sleepy book shelf.

This season we are excited to be reading Treasure Island

by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson.

We know our listeners are as unique as our novels and lucky for you.

Our bookshelf is varied, with lots of types of stories to lull you into a deep sleep.

The following is a preview to give you an idea of what to expect from this season.

Treasure Island is a historical adventure novel written for children and published in 1883, but set in the 1700s in a world of Buccaneers and buried gold.

It has been adapted and dramatized many times over.

See the Muppets Back Catalog for my personal favorite.

This story has had a marked influence over the way we think about pirates in the modern day, with one-legged

seaman, parrots and exes marking the spots on maps of deserted islands.

Allegedly it is thought that Treasure Island is a combination of two stories.

One is the taking of the ship Walrus off the island of La Graciosa near Tenerife, where these pirates buried their treasure and were subsequently killed in a battle with the Royal Navy, the treasure never having been recovered.

The second was of a Captain George Glass aboard the Earl of Sandwich in 1765, who was murdered along with others by the ship's cook and his gang, while traveling from Tenerife to London.

The murderous pirates were later all executed in Dublin

and the treasure they had buried was largely recovered.

Captain Glass's family had lived nearby to where Robert Louis Stevenson grew up in

Edinburgh and his family was part of a church congregation established by the victim's

father, so he had likely been captivated by this story from a young age. He also mentions by name several real life pirates and some real

events to add to the believability of Treasure Island, including Blackbeard and William Kidd, who you may have heard of before.

This is our second Robert Louis Stevenson book here on the bookshelf.

Last year we read the equally famous, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,

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