Ivanhoe

 What a beautiful book. I particularly admire when an author puts all their intellectual might into the creation of art, and it is even more impressive when said author clearly has a vast command and knowledge of an ample gamut of subjects on life. Ivanhoe very much reminded me of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. Both authors clearly cared deeply about the way their thoughts were put on the page. I had a wonderful time experiencing the beautiful way in which Sir Walter Scott used the English language, I only fell even more in love with it. In addition to that, I had lately been reading and watching documentaries on British history, and so it was quite fun to read about Richard Coeur de Lion. I was glad I did watch Simon Sachma's A History of Britain, since I suspect I would not have experienced the same excitement reading the word 'Plantagenet' in the novel had I not watched the documentary beforehand. I also feel like this book helped me understand a little more what people mean when they say 'Norman England' or 'Saxon England', for previously those two concepts were more abstract to my mind. Yet I was also very saddened to encounter still more evidence that antisemitism has been a fact of life since ancient times, and that not much moral progress has occurred in the last 800 years, especially when compared to the fantastic scientific progress we have seen since then, which might easily mislead us to incorrectly believe that progress in the humanities has been likewise fantastic. This was a wonderful book, that I highly recommend to everyone.