The 306 Greatest Books #68 - Candide

I am going back and posting all of my previous book reviews so that they are listed on my site in chronological order. The reviews are dated for the time when I read the book, hence the reason many of them will be listed for times before this website existed. 

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is Candide by Voltaire. This book can be found on the Sybervision Book List.

Candide is by the philosopher Voltaire, whose primary concern was optimism. Ironically though, the book turns out to be rather depressing, yet cheerful, at the same time. I am not sure how, it just does. It is written rather like a children's story, where there are very little embellishments and the characters zip around from place to place in a rather short time frame. But there are a lot of deaths (or supposed deaths), rape, war, slavery and other "adult" concepts making it definitely not a kid's story. The point of the story, I believe, was so that Voltaire could express his distaste for practically everything. This includes religion, war, and people's intolerance of each other (although he expresses his own intolerance rather well, a bit hypocritical). But anyway, the story is a rather interesting read, short (always a plus when your reading 300+ books), and I enjoyed it, but not enough to go on my personal greatest books list.