Unusual Christmas Gifts and the Jungle Book

Sarah has been after me to read The Jungle Book for several years now. I haven't really been resisting her efforts; it's just that I have so much to read at any given moment, it's hard to spare time for something a hundred years old. But I finally cracked open the book electronically anyway via manybooks.net. I read the first short story, and was pleased and disturbed at the same time.

I loved the writing and the characters. The story itself is a good one. But one of its implications, which Sarah and I have discussed at length, is that animals are all inherently inferior to man. Kipling demonstrates this by having none of the animals capable of looking Mowgli in the eye for very long. Classic power dynamic thing. I've met plenty of animals that could beat me in a staring contest, so this is just wrong. Sarah argues that in later stories, I might not see this to be the case, and also argues that Mowgli is neither man nor beast, really, and is something special. Kipling is saying something special about Mowgli there, not man in general. So we'll see as I read further into the book.

The reason I've finally started reading it is that Sarah and I have decided to record ourselves reading the Jungle Book as a gift to our nieces and nephews for Christmas. We're going to get as much of it done in time for Christmas as we can. They'll still get toys and such, but we hope they'll really enjoy these audio CDs, and they're a really personalized thing. Plus, I get to play with my podcasting equipment and software again!