Plain Tales from the Hills
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1888. Kipling, English short-story writer, novelist and poet, who celebrated the heroism of British colonial soldiers in India and Burma, he was the first Englishman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. Kipling's first collection of stories published in journals, contains tales about India and about the British in India. He establishes the subject which inspired so much of his work right at the beginning; that is, how India affected the British soldiers and officials who worked there.
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This was a bit hit and miss. Lots of short stories, some linking through with repeated characters. Each of the stories is set in Simla (Shimla), the hill station where the British ‘Summered'.
I had to give the ones written in that gibberish that was intended as an Irish dialect, a miss. It was not well done, and made reading the story too painful to persist with, so I skipped over those (four, I think?) stories.
It was interesting that the narrator told some stories, and was involved in some stories, even comments to the reader in places.
Of the forty )approx) stories, there were a half dozen stories that were very good, twenty that were entertaining and readable, another ten that just didn't entertain, leaving the four unread stories mentioned above.
Overall, worth the read. I picked up a 1910 copy of this, and three other Kipling books, so I expect i will leave the other three for a while before tackling.
