David Sarkies's Reviews > The Complete Essays

A French aristocrat shares his personal opinions
6 January 2013

Normally I would wait until I have finished a book to write a commentary, however this book is a lot different in that is contains a large collection of essays on a multiple of subjects. Secondly, I have not been reading this book continually, but rather picking it up, reading a few essays, and then putting it down again. I originally read a selection of these essays but when I finished it I decided to get my hands on a complete version, preferably hardcover, and it has been sitting next to my bed for the last two years (and I am only up to the second book of essays as of this writing – in fact I have only written comments on essays from two of the books).

This, as I mentioned, is a complete collection, however it is an older translation by John Florio, a contemporary of Montainge, which means that the English is quite archaic, though still quite readable. The only thing that stands out is the spelling (and since there was no real standardised spelling back then, this is understandable). Florio was also a contemporary of Shakespeare, so marking Florio down because of his spelling is sort of like doing the same with Shakespeare (and English has evolved a lot since then).

Anyway, this post is actually quite long, in fact longer than what Goodreads allows me to post, so instead of spilling over into the comments, I have instead decided to post the commentary in my blog (which also allows for better presentation that Goodreads, though not by much since it is Blogger – I hope to go over to Wordpress sometime soon, but due to time commitments I am not able to at this stage).