So with all my challenge reading set up for 2017, you may be wondering why I am already reading books that aren't really for challenges. To be honest, I had wanted to read this book for the 2016 Mount TBR challenge, but it didn't happen - I ran out of time. Instead of relegating it to the TBR pile until who-knows-when, I decided to just read it already. So I did!
This book surprised me. I knew it was old, but didn't quite realize that it was almost 200 years old, and that it's often considered the first English novel. The bulk of it is really taken up with how the titular character sets up housekeeping after the shipwreck, and I really enjoyed this part of it. I like hearing how people survive in unlikely places. I could have done without the religious sermonizing that occasionally crops up, but I realize that that's sort of a feature of writing of this era. I couldn't believe Friday didn't appear until about page 160 - I thought he had more of a role in the book.
Another surprise was that soon after Friday shows up, so do a ton of other people. Crusoe lives almost 30 years alone on this island, and it's suddenly Grand Central Station. There is another shipwreck with no survivors, and then another cannibal incursion that includes Friday's father and a Spanish sailor, and then a bunch of mutineers comes ashore. This was not what I had pictured in my mind for how this story would go.
Something amusing to me was how colonial Crusoe is. He's a slaver who gets rich, and despite seeming to have some live-and-let-live thoughts about the "cannibal savages" who occasionally visit his island, as soon as Friday shows up Crusoe takes him for a servant and basically tries to make him over as a European. Why couldn't Crusoe learn Friday's language? What's Friday's actual name? What was his daily life like before he had a brush with cannibals who wanted to eat him? Defoe even describes how the Spanish sailor speaks the language of Friday and his father fairly well. Why can't Crusoe? I guess that's just the language nerd in me.
But these are early 21st century ideas being imposed on a book written in the early 18th century, and I'll stop now, before I get into the cheekiness of Crusoe slagging off the Spanish for deplorable colonial behavior while never holding his own English fellows to the same standard. Evidently the bible he read voraciously was missing the page with the whole "why are you worried about the speck in your neighbor's eye when you've got a freaking LOG in your eye" thing. Ha ha!
All in all though, I did enjoy the bulk of this book, believe it or not. It made me want to read more Defoe, although I will probably skip the little-known sequels to this book, and it will have to wait.
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