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3.17 AVERAGE
3.17 AVERAGE
medium-paced
adventurous
challenging
informative
reflective
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Crusoe, sweetie, I'm gonna hold your hand while saying this, you talk too much !
While I can appreciate how this novel helped shape the genre of popular fiction today, I couldn't get more than halfway through it before giving up on it. Defoe does an admirable job of capturing the realistic struggles of his character as he fights to survive while stranded and alone on a desert island. His main character has to teach himself how to do everything, from planting and growing his own food, to making furniture, to making basic tools to carry out all these endeavors. It takes months and many mistakes before he can achieve any of this. The story itself, the character who is admittedly flawed and self-absorbed, even the prose is all fine and believable. It is the pacing of the story that got me in the end. The descriptions of things and how the character struggles past each new obstacle gets very repetitive and circular. I would be reading about something that happened during one season only to have the author take me back and harp about something else he'd already belabored to death that happened months or weeks earlier, reiterating the same info again and again. I finally gave up when I got halfway through the novel and nothing new had happened. Robinson Crusoe was still struggling to learn how to do everything, with no foreshadowing of things to come, like encountering cannibals, or finding Friday his eventual companion. I just couldn't go on. Unlike Robinson Crusoe I guess I don't have what it takes to survive this adventure with him.
adventurous
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
adventurous
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I understand that this book is a "classic" - a book of historical importance for the field of children's literature. For that reason, I am glad I read the book (while listening to the audio). The language and vocabulary are beautiful!!! But, the storyline is painful. Defoe tends to get hung up on details of little importance at the expense of moving the plot along. I appreciate its importance, and as I said I love the language and vocabulary, but not an enjoyable read for me.
Golly this was hard to get through. It's realism writing, so Crusoe describes every single little detail of what he does. For example, I'll flip to a random page and there will be a quote like "I was surprised, and yet very well pleased, to see the young trees grow; and I pruned them, and led them up to grow as much alike as I could; and it is scarce credible how beautiful a figure they grew into in three years; so that though the hedge made a circle of about 25 yards in diameter, yet the trees, for such I might now call them, soon covered it, and it was a complete shade, sufficient to lodge under all dry season." AND THAT WAS ONE SENTENCE. The book is like Walden but with less social commentary. Crusoe is also a huge arsehole. He was a slave for 2 years and is so so sad about it, and then as soon as he escapes he joins a slaving ship destined for Africa. I would never have finished even the first chapter of this book if I didn't have to write an in-class essay on it.
adventurous
informative
relaxing
medium-paced