I recently listened to the audiobook of Kim by Rudyard Kipling as part of my Nobel literature project. Kipling won the prize in 1907, so he is currently the earliest Nobel laureate I have read. I think I read The Jungle Book and Just So Stories as a kid (or had them read to me), but this was my first time reading Kipling as an adult. I had seen that Kim was on a 1998 list of 100 best novels of the twentieth century and thought I should give it a try rather than reread something I had read before. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t really for me. I tend to have trouble connecting with older literature anyway, and what was normal for a British man in India in 1901 is disturbingly colonialist and racist to me now. I don’t have a whole lot to say about it. I didn’t really get grabbed by the adventure side of the story, I didn’t enjoy the caricatures of Indians, and I doubt I’ll be reading much more Kipling.
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