Skip to main content

Daniel Defoe - Robinson Crusoe (Big Book List - Random Draw)


A good friend of mine, Ken West, decided to binge listen to Robinson Crusoe on a long road trip he just took. His PhD dissertation will center around Rousseau’s Emile in which Defoe’s work figures prominently. He loved the book and asked that I also read it. I decided right before the end of the month, over Memorial Day weekend to finish this book.

I have binged listened to/read significant portions and I also love this book. This book raises, like Huckleberry Finn, some big issues of racism in classic literature which I will deal with as I go throughout this work. Defoe’s description of Friday is pretty terrible, but it seems that the world has not thrown away this text despite some very grievous errors in this regard. Defoe’s work is a deeply Christian work as well which I was caught off guard by. G.K. Chesterton once was asked what book he would bring to a desert island, and without batting an eye (instead of saying the Bible as he was a devout Christian) he said, The Practical Guide for Ship Building. It is clear now that Chesterton meant this book. Defoe is a master story teller, and I didn’t want others to come find Crusoe, I deeply enjoyed my time on the island. It was a true delight to sit with this book. Like My Antonia I didn’t ever want the life on the farm part to end, I also didn’t want the time on the Island to end.

If you have any earnest, raw enjoyment of fiction still left in your soul, read Robinson Crusoe and force yourself to read it quickly and it will charm your old, jaded heart. I loved it. Two small tie-ins to mention here, first Defoe is quite critical through the lens of Crusoe of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Crusoe admits at least to himself though not to Friday oddly enough that the Spanish were brutal to the civilizations already inhabiting the Americas when they arrived. Defoe, here, seesm

Secondly, at the end of Robinson Crusoe, the pair of Crusoe and Friday go on other adventures and the book sort of ends abruptly, but their last adventure recorded in the book is in the mountains of southern France near where Emily St. Aubert would have resided before this timeline as Udolpho was set in the 1584 though written in 1795. Defoe published Crusoe in 1719 and I imagine it was set in the mid to late 1600’s. Crusoe gets lost in a forest near Languedoc.

This may cause me to create another spreadsheet where I attempt to put all of the characters and authors of classic literature on one timeline! Probably not, but who knows.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lamentation of the Destruction of Ur

 I hope that this project does not totally spin out of control with the endless introductions of new lists. I don't know how The Lamentation of the Destruction of Ur got on my list. I imagine at one point I was skimming through the Norton Anthology of World Literature and there is some slight reference to it which may have been enough to prompt me to add it to an Ancient Literature list. I have no idea but I thought to add it as an Anonymous entry and leave it for 35 years from now. Now that I am a year into this project, many books and research questions have been asked I pull this strange text out of the ether and I confront it head on.  One of the challenges of selecting books based off of their titles alone is that many times there is not a collected, singular volume of a text available that I can simply buy online, listen to an audiobook version of and move along. This text was written somewhere between 2112 B.C. and 2004 B.C. according to Wikipedia (which seems younger t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Anonymous - The Maxims of Ptahhotep (Small Works List)

 I felt the snake bite here of wandering to far afield from the original intention of this project. I had a very underdeveloped list of ancient writings in one of the segments of the Small Works List. Because of this, I thought that I should find some way of coming to terms with this lacking in the list and find a way to fold in a more robust catalog of the literature of the ancient world. I have studied Christian theology and Church history at the graduate level and so I thought I might have some sense of what might be hiding behind this veil but I was woefully mistaken at my purchase into this arena. I was confronted by this with the issue of simply getting my hands on a readable copy of this text.  I am not sure where I went to flesh out these category, but I had a smattering of readings especially from Ancient Egypt on the same list as the Greeks. The time frame that these things exist in are as far away as modern American writings are from early Christian writings and so ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Christopher Columbus - The Diario of Christopher Columbus First Voyage

This is probably the most research I have put into a Small Works List entry. It often happens that I have no idea who the author is and what they have written that is most significant. I am thinking here of Ki No Tsurayuki and trying to track down what he wrote inside of the Kokin Wakashu. Then I think about Guaman Poma whose name couldn’t have been more obscure from me, but it was clear what the document he would be known for. Isaac Newton also presented some problems for me to get a document that I could actually understand.    Christopher Columbus is probably one of the most famous, or infamous, people who ever lived. Towns, Countries, parks, statues, a national holiday that has recently been renamed (and for good reason), and there isn’t a clear book or text that he wrote? How odd is that? I did a bit of Googling and I found that Penguin Classics has a collection of documents that they package together and call it the 4 voyages. I ordered this book to fi...
Post a Comment
Read more