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4.02 AVERAGE
4.02 AVERAGE
adventurous
dark
hopeful
fast-paced
Read for BBCTop 200. Apparently the truthiness of Charriere’s adventures has been “debunked” over the years but honestly, this is just a great adventure tale. The narrator of the Audible version did a fantastic job & this was a great listen for my commute & a road trip. Forget about fact-checking & just enjoy the ride 😊
adventurous
dark
emotional
sad
tense
slow-paced
It's strange to enjoy a book that contains so many linear feet devoted to the act of storing one's worldly goods in their "lower intestine". Still, this is a classic for a reason. You'll notice that I have classified it both as non-fiction and fiction, since the truthfulness of the story is up for debate. Papillon places himself dead centre as the moral hero of every escape or success, the man who possesses sufficient strength and intelligence to pull himself over every obstacle. Whether or not everything is 100% true, you can still cheer him on and appreciate the journey.
I don't feel like subjecting myself to the stress from following along a man's numerous prison escape attempts
Quite an insightful story of one incarcerated person's experiences. He doesn't talk about his past much, but he was clearly an underworld/criminal figure in France, and his story reflects this. It is direct and unvarnished. One of my favorite part is during WW II and France is looking for soldiers, but Papillon and his mates laugh at the idea of serving a country who has kept them locked up.
My daughter is going to read it next. She adores Victor Hugo and Michel Foucault. I wonder how she will react to a Valjean-esque character meeting a highly mechanized/brutal penal system. Maybe that is a good subtitle... Les Miserables meets Panopticon?
My daughter is going to read it next. She adores Victor Hugo and Michel Foucault. I wonder how she will react to a Valjean-esque character meeting a highly mechanized/brutal penal system. Maybe that is a good subtitle... Les Miserables meets Panopticon?
Damn you, Andrew Luck, for telling me this is your favorite book. You're my biggest celebrity crush, and so I trusted your book suggestions with my life, and you have instead introduced me to a book that is causing me anxiety because (1) I cannot truly know what this life would do to someone, (2) it causes me second-hand seasickness (almost as badly as any Diana Gabaldon book or The Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor by Gabriel García Márquez), and (3) I cannot determine how much truth is in Charrière's story! Maybe one day I'll get around to finishing this book, but it is too stressful for me. This may be a November read. I am not yet giving up on summer fantasies.
I found the story really engaging and I was curious to see how it unfolded. But I didn't really like our protagonist
I was impressed with the writing of the author. He is able to tell the story with a good use of language that I was not expecting. It is a little hard to believe the entire book as an accurate narrative of what happened. But it is entertaining, nonetheless.