978. Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe

eBook source: Free from epubbooks (ePub)

Read on: Sony PRS-300

Thoughts
I was familiar with the story, and expected this to be a bit preachy, but instead found it to be a very engaging read. Although Moll Flanders would have been considered to be a very wicked woman by the standards of her time, she is presented sympathetically as a victim of the circumstances of her life. The story is told in Moll's own voice, so her exploits are described matter of factly, and it gives an insight into what life might have been like for someone in her situation.

Moll's financial situation seems to drive her actions throughout her adult life, and much of the book describes how she acquires money (either through securing husbands/lovers as a means of support or by her own industry). Sometimes I find it difficult to convert how much sums of money mentioned in older works would be worth in today's terms (also I have difficulty with the pounds, shillings, guineas etc because I'm used to dollars). However, this book frequently outlined the price of goods, and even included a breakdown of the costs associated with birthing a child (with various options for levels of service), which made it easy for me to get a feel for the worth of the money (and also put into perspective some of the incomes that I've read in other works such as those by Austen).

About the eBook
I encountered a page error when I tried to read this book on the Sony Pocket reader. I have come across this before with large eBooks (the Sony readers have limits on the size of each chapter). To get around it, I used to Calibre to convert it to lit format, removed the book from my library, added the lit version back to the library and then converted it to ePub. After that I had no trouble and this roundtrip did not seem to cause any harm to the formatting of the eBook.

eBooks read so far: 4