"Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes" by Robert Louis Stevenson

Every year for the past... while... I've been participating in the "Victober" reading challenge that goes around Bookstagram every year.  The idea is to read some Victorian literature during October.  This year, I reread Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, my favorite novel ever, kind of on a whim.  But I also decided that I wanted to read some more Robert Louis Stevenson because I really love the way he writes, but it's been a long time since I tried one of his books I hadn't read already.

Fellow bookstagrammer Andy @places_and_books recommended this book to me, I found a cool copy on AbeBooks that arrived in a timely fashion, and off I went!

Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes is exactly what it sounds like -- Robert Louis Stevenson buys a donkey to carry his homemade sleeping bag and other supplies and walks through a part of France known as the Cévennes for a couple of weeks in late September and early October.  And then he wrote a really funny little travelogue about it.  

The introduction to my copy says that this was his first really big literary success, which is kind of surprising because I would expect readers back then to have picked it up because it was by Stevenson, like I did, but no!  They read it because it sounded interesting all by itself.

And it really is a fun little real-life adventure.  He gets lost, he has to make camp in the dark, he encounters all sorts of quirky local characters, he stays at a monastery for a while, and so on.  All told with light and winsome humor that made me chuckle aloud more than once.  

I definitely recommend this illustrated edition because it's a nice size, about 8"x11", and is filled with photos and paintings from the area he describes, PLUS Stevenson's own sketches that he made during the journey!  I'm so glad an internet friend I've never met who lives all the way over in Britain recommended this to me, because I might never have read it otherwise, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Particularly Good Bits:

M. Élie Berthet has made him the hero of a novel, which I have read, and do not wish to read again (p. 57).

We speak of hardships, but the true hardship is to be a dull fool, and permitted to mismanage life in our own dull and foolish manner (p. 81).

And yet even while I was exulting in my solitude I became aware of a strange lack.  I wished a companion to lie near me in the starlight, silent and not moving, but ever within touch.  For there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.  And to live out of doors with the woman a man loves is of all lives the most complete and free (p. 93).

And if we find but one to whom we can speak out of our heart freely, with whom we can walk in love and simplicity without dissimulation, we have no ground of quarrel with the world or God (p. 115).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for scenes at the beginning where Stevenson can't figure out how to get his new donkey to move unless he hits her.  He regrets this, and anyone who's had to deal with a donkey will understand it, but it might worry some younger readers.

This has been my tenth book read and reviewed for my fifth Classics Club list.