Status Updates From Diario del año de la peste

Like many a dissenter, from Bunyan to Shaw, he gained the elements of a literary style from the Bible - the plain way of the austere vocabulary, the tone of the moralist and the small prophet.

A new class was developing, one unconnected with royalty, the Established Church, and the traditions of the agrarian society. It sought salvation in trade and in a kind of Calvinism and it lived in the towns. The old way and the new were not any longer in the conflict of arms, but they were in conflict. Daniel Defoe was born into dialectic.

Defoe was our first great novelist because he was our first great journalist, and he was our first great journalist because he was born, not into literature, but into life.

But rarely in Defoe do we find the cranking of the engine of plot, and never the evocation of classical heroes or the sewing on of classical tags. His novels are too much novels to seem like novels; they read like real life.

The casual reader of, or dipper into, A Journal of the Plague Year, uninformed as to Daniel Defoe's date of birth or his literary aims and methods, may be forgiven for thinking it a genuine book of memoirs. This is what it reads like and is meant to read like - a rapid, colloquial, sometimes clumsy setting-down of reminiscences of a great historical event that was lived through by a plain London merchant with a passi

i admire his insistance of evidence

more zombie proof: "...should one of those infected, diseased creatures have bitten any man or woman while the frenzy of the distemper was upon them, they... would as certainly have been incurably infected as one that was sick before..."

Zombie proof: "Some will have it to be in the nature of the disease, and that it impresses every one that is seized upon by it with a kind of a rage, and a hatred against their own kind... prompting him with evil will or an evil eye, that, as they say in the case of a mad dog, who though the gentlest creature before of any of his kind, yet then will fly upon and bite any one that comes next him.."

i cant imagine these things really happening... id rather pretend it was zombies.

this is "heavy" reading. very interesting, and even if it is a fiction, i assume i draws from some sort of accounts to make a very convincing picture of the coming plague. amid the data laden text is a sense of reality i havent felt before when reading about the plague. i dont want to put this book down.

Im getting tired of all the God Almighty mentions. oh, the middle ages.

O misery! We both shall dye, woe, woe.

Defoe actually lived through the plague in London. Very different from Year of Wonders, but just as harrowing...worse.

So far it has been interesting, and very informative re: statistics & other info. I was hoping for a more personal day-to-day account of someone living amongst the plague, but this seems to be more reflective about the situation as a whole.

of 109

I have the Oxford Paperbacks release, but I don't see it here.

a gruelling but illuminating read

this is a gruelling but compelling account