Robinson Crusoe

I really enjoyed this. No chapters, just sort of pick up and read and put it down as you please. It does not try to outpace your attention, but it is entertaining and I liked how Crusoe learns his lessons. I think it is a timely read if you take it as a moral meditation. We are surrounded by beeps and blips and buzzes and I think many of us would welcome a stay on a desert island, hence the Minecraft reference. This has really made me realize that I struggle to trust God with my sustenance.

Friday is definitely not the best representation of a native person, but he is also not the worst. Yeah, it's kind of awful that he totally submits to this white man, but I don't see how Defoe writing in 1719 could have come up with something better. Considering the time period, it is actually something remarkable that Crusoe treats Friday as an actual human and not a subhuman. I think it is important not to dismiss an entire work because of one or two imperfect elements.

I really liked Robinson Crusoe. Much more than I expected to. It had a much deeper spiritual component that I had not expected, though maybe religion was just always part of life for Europeans of the 1700s. Robin(son) was a disobedient young man, even if "a good guy" in the eyes of the world. When he was shipwrecked and landed on his island of despair he went from not caring about Religion, to being mad at God, to knowing God never existed, to praying for his needs, to celebrating a sabbath, to being thankful that he had survived, to actually reading his Bible, to a true personal relationship with Jesus to bringing the only man he met to the same, and struggling how to live as a Christian in the world God put him.

At one time I thought it may have been the best Christian Fiction I ever read, it felt so much more real than dumb stories like the Left Behind series or radicicolous stories like the Amish Romance series, until the last third or so of the book when it got kind of racist and violent, and adamantly anti-Catholic. While there are many racist and violent people who call themselves Christians now-a-days I don't believe that was ever the plan of the prince of peace, and the Catholic Church is the Church He founded.

But even with all I am amazed how much Defoe kept me "turning the pages" of my audio book in a very interesting story, told almost completely without any additional characters. I have a hard time believing the claim that this was the first ever English novel, but it would make sense why all of the older stuff we read in school were plays (which were meant to be seen not read) and not novels.