The Jungle Book :: Reading to Know Book Club SEPTEMBER

September's selection for the Reading to Know Book Club is The Jungle Books, by Rudyard Kipling. Sky from Circus Caravan will be leading the discussion for this month's read. Here are her opening thoughts:

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Note: the 'first' Jungle Book is what I would like to focus on, it is the original and predates the Second Jungle Book by one to two years.

Kipling was born and raised for six years in India, he was then sent to England where he completed his education at the United Services College. In 1882, when he was sixteen, Kipling returned to his native country and started writing short stories for an Anglo-Indian newspaper.

In 1892 Kipling and his wife, Carrie, moved to Brattleboro, Vermont. It was here that Mowgli was born to paper. While Kipling possibly wrote these short stories for their first daughter, he most definitely revisited the land of his birth in the completely fiction fairy tales about the jungle, the animals and a boy named Mowgli. The poetical quality and the morals touched upon combined with the magic of an exotic place to make an unforgettable fantasy. The original stories are whole lot more 'earthy' than the Disney movie version. (You may want to pre-read it before reading them out loud to your own human brood.)

I will be reading my own 1927 Doubleday copy. The local library had an 1899 copy published by the New York based Century Company. But it also had an unabridged, illustrated version! The Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling, Illustrated by Jerry Pinkney, afterward by Peter Glassman, published in 1995 by William Morrow and Company as a part of their Books of Wonder compilation.

Since Kipling's writings were originally published with illustrations I think it is fitting that we may read them in that way.
I hope you have an adventurous journey in the jungle this month and will bring your favorite moral to discussion at the trips end.

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I'm looking forward to this read, having never had any exposure to Kipling except by way of Disney! This promises to be a fun adventure.

Who else is "in"?! Leave a comment letting us know if you are planning to read along this month!