Read on: computer screen using Calibre viewer
Thoughts
I chose to read this work next because I have been slogging my way through the Tale of Genji all week and thought that a short, satirical piece would be a nice diversion. Swift describes the work as
A Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick
This is a short story rather than a book (only around 17 pages long). Intellectually I can appreciate the value of the work as social commentary through satire, however I didn't find it amusing and I would not normally choose to read something that makes light of eating infants regardless of its motivations. I found some spellings of words in this work quaint (like publick), however overall it was not an enjoyable read. At least it was a quick one.
About the eBook
Because it was so short, I read it on screen rather than on a dedicated eBook device. There are several free versions of this book available online, and all of the ones that I found were based on the Project Gutenberg text. ManyBooks provides this eBook in a lot of different formats, however the Project Gutenberg information and legal/copyright information is up front in their ePub version, which means having to page through all of that information (which is longer than the work itself) before getting to the real content. I chose to read the MobileRead eBook because it put all of that additional text at the end instead.
eBooks read so far: 5
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