on
3.5/5
Non-Fiction
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English 45B
Rating: 3.5/5
Pages:
Started: 25 January 2024
Finished: 30 January 2024
Summary:
Though Robinson Crusoe's father warned him not to give up his middle-class comfort for a life of adventure, the temptation was too great. Following Crusoe's involvement in the slave trade, to his decades of solitude on an uninhabited island where he was forced to build himself a new life out of almost nothing, to his process of fighting off invaders, to his re-immersion in civilization after the termination of his island solitude, Robinson Crusoe is a tale of adventure, reconnection to spirituality and nature, and the survival of man.
Thoughts:
This was a pretty fun book, although I think I would have been bored if I were not reading it in the context of a literature class. All the adventure and survival was quite exciting; I liked hearing about all the things Crusoe built and all the details of how he survived. However the racism was so blatant and gross that it negated the fun of the story. The Swiss Family Robinson, in a similar vein and written one hundred years later, had a lot more morality and fun, and a bit less God and racism. I will be curious to continue the class discussion, and I love thinking about Robinson Crusoe as a marker of its times, but I do not think this is a book I will be reading again.