The 306 Greatest Books #131 - Moll Flanders

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is Moll Flanders  by Daniel Defoe. This book can be found on the Sybervision Book List.

I was hesitant to start reading Moll Flanders because Defoe's other work on the list, Robinson Crusoe, didn't really strike my fancy. I found Robinson Crusoe to be overly dragging and not that upbeat. Well, now we come to Moll Flanders and I have several of the same criticisms. Although the book is only 340ish pages long, it seemed to drag on forever. I could be reading twenty minutes and it felt like an hour. Defoe is often very repetitive, not only with small portions of text, saying almost the same bunch of sentences verbatim a few paragraphs later, but the plot itself was on a never-ending cycle of repeat. The story follows a woman who was raised as a cast off from a prisoner. The first third of the novel deals with her repeated marriages, which needless to say, got old really quickly. The second third of the novel actually got me back into the book. Although, this was also a bunch of the same, over and over again, I actually became interested in the character for once in the story. The character herself claims in the book this was because of people enjoy reading about her wickedness. I'm not sure if that was the case or if the author actually made the character interesting for once. The problems resurface again in the last portion, where the character is "redeemed". Even though she is redeemed, I never, ever, get the impression she is ever sorry for what she did and even remotely changed her ways. She was lying and manipulating people right up through the last page of the text. Overall, I am often harsh on books where it is difficult to get into a book because of the writing style. Defoe's writing style is fine, it's just his plots are overly redundant and slow paced. I can't recommend this story to anyone, sorry.

The 306 Greatest Books #78 - Robinson Crusoe

Note - This review was originally published on my other site "The Geology P.A.G.E." but due to the content I have moved it here and backdated the post.

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. This book can be found on the Sybervision and Observer book lists.

While I was reading Robinson Crusoe, I definitely got a Cast Away feeling about the book. I know many people thought that Cast Away was a boring movie, and the book came across the same way. It just seemed to drag on forever. At the beginning of the novel I kept waiting, and waiting, for him to become ship wrecked, and then when he finally was, nothing exciting happened. For a book that seemed to be billed as an action-adventure novel, I got none of that through the narrative. It's not a totally bad book and I rather enjoyed the plot, I just felt it was really slow at times. I found it amusing how, no matter what Robinson did, he seemed to end up with the short end of the stick. One major problem I had with the book though, was that Defoe constantly referred to the Native Americans/Native Islanders as savages and cannibals. I can see how Crusoe might have thought of them that way at the beginning of the story but even after meeting them Defoe continued to show them eating other humans. Sorry, but cannibalism was not that widespread. This is a definite pass for me.