A review by cronopista
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

1.0

So you find yourself in a deserted island: what do you do first? Maybe explore it? Oh no, don't be impatient! First you must spend about a year building a proper, civilized home, and then you can peek outside. But just a peek, because your second year you should be pretty busy making pots and pans and growing grain so that you can, yes!, reinvent English cooking! Of course, a full exploration will have to wait until the sixth year, but you will have done far more important things by then, like, praying a lot and becoming even more racist and ethnocentric than you were when you first arrived.

This book is boring and completely devoid of any insight, spirit or thought beyond the most basic Christian platitudes. It is amusing to see Robinson deal with Friday who, even when he learns "to speak" (he doesn't learn English, no, he learns "to speak") never utters his real name: I found particularly hilarious the moment when Friday puts Robinson's foot on his own head, which Robinson unequivocally interprets as a generous offer to be "his slave forever".

Some idiotic reviews out there say that one should take on account the historical context and blah blah blah: BS. There are plenty of much older books, from the Iliad to Cervantes and Shakespeare (a 100 years earlier) that do not fall into this book's many, many errors, both ideological and literary.