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sarahmcsarah's review against another edition
3.0
holy cow, if he mentioned Phoebus one more time....
soprano_buddy15's review against another edition
3.0
A harder read.... but once you get into it it becomes easier to understand the unstandardized English. Some pretty witty parts in there too.
harryedmundson's review against another edition
3.0
[Desire and Power] my fave part was when england remembered how shit he is and wanted to kill himself
italo_carlvino's review against another edition
4.0
I only read sections of book 1 of this GARGANTUAN work of poetry, and it's good. The imagery can be really fantastical and creative, there are some clever allusions, it is richly thematic, and reading most book one for class makes me want to read the rest of this poem some day. (But seriously guys, it is LONG, like it is +1,000 pages and Spenser DIDN'T EVEN FINISH IT! AHHH!)
anna_wa's review against another edition
This was way too confusing. I really tried my best to tough it out for class but after a certain point I couldn't. It didn't make sense. (And according to our teacher, it didn't make sense to the people who read it when it was first released either, so there's that.)
Content Warnings
Graphic: Blood
Moderate: Kidnapping
marysee's review against another edition
5.0
A difficult classic to read because even in his time period (Elizabethan) he wrote in an older English. Roy Maynard's commentary and helps are welcome when you don't have an English professor in the house. I read it to one of our teens and now I'm reading it for the second time to another child and it gets easier and more enjoyable the more I read it. It is really growing on me.
Spencer's Faerie Queene is one of C. S. Lewis's favorite books. He read it as a boy. I'm impressed.
Spencer's Faerie Queene is one of C. S. Lewis's favorite books. He read it as a boy. I'm impressed.
theinquisitxor's review against another edition
3.0
Read this for my Brit Lit Class. I enjoyed discussing Book One more than I enjoyed reading it, but I did overall like the story. I doubt I will ever read the rest of the Faerie Queene on my own unless I read if for a future class.
abetterjulie's review against another edition
3.0
Hard to rate a book with this much history and from a time period which uses a different English. Without the footnotes, I'd have been lost. I wish there'd been more of them in the version I read on the Kindle because there were frequently words I couldn't parse from context or roots. I would never have guessed this was political or allegorical. Do we still make literature that functions at this level? I preferred Virgil and Milton to Spenser, but I'm glad to have read it.