Read in 2016

Saturday, May 19, 2007

BOOK: The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery

Cute little fairy tale from the top 50_books list and part of my Once Upon a Time Reading Challenge. I looked up the SparkNotes because there was certainly more to the story. I see that it is cute, I liked the moral, and after I looked up the notes it more made sense, but I don't think I would ever remember to list it as one of my favorite books.

The Little Prince leaves his tiny planet and travels through space, landing on other tiny planets, meeting caricatures of adults and all the bad qualities adults can have with all their silly rules. Eventually he lands on Earth and meets the narrator, a pilot whose plane has crashed. The Prince has a profound effect on the pilot, but the Prince also learns some lessons about love from a fox and life from a snake.


Some notes from Sparks that I liked:
The Little Prince can be read as a metaphor of the process of introspection itself, wherein two halves of the same person meet and learn from each other.

Saint-Exupéry urges his readers to participate actively in the reading process, using their imaginations to assign deeper meaning to deceptively simple prose and poetry

His constant questioning also indicates that one’s search for answers can be more important than the answers themselves.

I read this in about an hour or so, and I might read it again with the Sparks notes in mind.


3 comments:

  1. I've never read this one either, and am surprised at the content. I actually thought it was about a little prince in, say, Wales, or somewhere. Silly me!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I wish I'd thought to look up Sparks Notes when I read this book. It made very little sense to me, as I recall. And, I do like the author.

    ReplyDelete
  3. bookfool - I've been going to sparksnotes as I read 'deep' books. It helps me get the book, because they are classics for a reason, and I am very literal. Let's just say it's a very good thing I read Animal Farm in school, because I would have been very confused.

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for commenting, so nice of you to visit.

(I'll try without the letters for a while - so please dont be a spammer! Let's try no anonymous users)