The Coral Island

What Hacker News says

1. rmkJul 2022
   A lot. If you read a lot of nonfiction and are looking to ease into fiction, here are a few suggestions:

   - Read historical fiction, or fiction that is extremely well-researched. I like James Michener.

   - Read travel and adventure type stories. Personal favorites in this category are The Treasure Island by R L Stevenson, and The Coral Island by R M Ballantyne. Both are not particularly long, and the original is still suprisingly readable in this day and age. Bonus: these are extremely well-regarded classics. I personally find Ballantyne's usage of the English language very pleasant and enjoyable. Stevenson's writing in another classic, Kidnapped, will leave you feeling as if you have lived all your life in Scotland.

   - If you want to read something very serious, then perhaps 1984 may be a good choice in our troubled times of persistent surveillance and abuse of language for nefarious ends.

   - If you want something light, then go no further than P G Wodehouse: there are many fine books to read by this author, such as the excellent Right Ho, Jeeves, Service With a Smile, or Galahad at Blandings. You couldn't go very wrong with Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome, or Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith.

   - If you want something that is easy to read, but still profound, try Ernest Hemingway. I recommend A Farewell to Arms, or The Old Man and The Sea. This counts as serious literature, so just steer clear of this if you don't want to read "Literature".

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2. northwest65Jun 2021
   Lord of the Flies was somewhat a rebuttal to The Coral Island. More enjoyable to read though.
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3. like_any_otherDec 2025
   Strange how proving the book utterly false has not dimmed its literary reputation even a little, nor caused a resurgence of the "unrealistic" Coral Island that Golding set out to disprove and displace [1]. In fact being proven false has not been acknowledged at all by the literary world, which show how much respect that world deserves.

   [1] Golding thought that the book was unrealistic and asked his wife whether it would be a good idea if he "wrote a book about children on an island, children who behave in the way children really would behave?" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies#Background

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4. like_any_otherDec 2025
   Partly. But again, in the author's own words, he "wrote a book about children on an island, children who behave in the way children really would behave". Even his motivation was that Coral Island was "unrealistic". You'd think that would earn the book at least a little asterisk. Meanwhile Animal Farm is obviously intended to be allegorical by using animals as protagonists.

   While I disagree, one could argue that Lord of the Flies deserves to be so highly regarded despite being so wrong about children. But can one really argue that, when a highly regarded and extremely well known work, that is ostensibly about children, gets shown to be completely factually wrong on children, the appropriate amount of self-reflection for the literary world, that had heaped (and continues to heap) so much praise on it, is zero?

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5. rmkDec 2021
   The Coral Island, by R M Ballantyne

   It was written a long time ago, and I read an abridged version as a kid. I got a copy to give away as a present, but got the unabridged version, which is not suitable for children. I decided to read it myself, and I am halfway through it.

   It is going to be the best book I've read this year, because it is pure escapism in many ways, and this year has been strangely sucky despite the arrival of vaccines and a supposed return to normalcy.

   Honorable mentions: - Night in the Solomons, Louis Lamour

   - Bad Blood, John Carreyrou

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