I have lost count now of how many times I have actually read this classic adventure. Yet in October, I got an urge yet again to give Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson another rereading.

Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle are the prose writers who have the most amount of work that I regularly find myself returning to read again and again. For Stevenson the three works are:

Kidnapped
Treasure Island
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

For Conan Doyle it is all his Sherlock Holmes stories and novels and, of course, The Lost World.

Both Stevenson and Conan Doyle were born in Edinburgh and are basically contemporaries: Stevenson (1850–1894); Conan Doyle (1859–1930).

Kidnapped tells the story of David Balfour, a recently orphaned Scottish teenager who sets out to claim his inheritance from his miserly uncle, Ebenezer Balfour. He ends up being betrayed, kidnapped, and put aboard a ship bound for the American colonies and slavery.

Aboard the ship, David befriends the charismatic Jacobite rebel and fugitive, Alan Breck Stewart, after warning him of a plot against his life. After the ship is wrecked, the two unlikely companions, a Lowland Whig and a Highland Jacobite, escape and trek across the Scottish Highlands. Their journey becomes a perilous flight for their lives when they accidentally witness a political murder and are wrongly accused as accomplices, forcing them to evade the pursuing Redcoats.

It is an exciting adventure story that, for this reader, somehow never gets old. Especially a few of my favorite chapters that I find myself eagerly anticipating with each rereading.

I have tried here before to put my finger on what it is that draws people in general, and me specifically, to reread certain works. I still have not figured it out.

But I have figured out that, for me, Kidnapped is one of those books that I will continue to come back to.