Robinson Crusoe

This interesting book by Daniel Defoe took a bit to get into, but after getting used to his writing style, proved to be a pretty good read. I think people are pretty familiar with the basic storyline. It's the story of an Englishman gets marooned on a deserted island, and details his time spent there.

A bit more about the writing style... What made this a challenging read at first was the way Defoe would take something as straightforward as He walked up and said, "Hi.", and turned it into a paragraph-length affair, with thesaurus at the ready to bring out the big words. My initial thought, re-reading some of this was, surely he didn't make it this wordy...I must be missing some deeper meaning here. After surrendering to the wordiness, and dropping the over analysis, the story clipped right along.

I'd recommend it. It was a pretty interesting read and gives a lot of thought to what it might be like to be stranded. What kinds of things might a person miss? What skills would be particularly useful to know? Etc.