2021-09-10 - gargantua and pantagruel book 1

i recently finished listening to the librivox recording for this book and it was mostly rough. getting through the book was rough because of bad recordings but also because the vocabulary used in the translation isn't very familiar to me. for the most part, i didn't understand much of the plot until i read a summary of the book afterwards. if i had to describe the plot before reading the summary, it would go like this:

gargantua was born. he grew up. there was a war. friar john is cool. many really dirty jokes are made throughout his life.

though i didn't get a good understanding of the plot until afterwards, i did understand many of the dirty jokes and similar silly things... lol, i don't think that's a good thing though. here are some of the things i remember:

gargantua tried many materials to use for toilet paper and he found that the best material was the neck of a goose.
a discussion over why friar john's nose looked so good started out with saying he was really good before this life, but friar john himself said the reason is because his wet nurse had much larger breasts than other women.
a battle was fought over about cakes.
gargantua's mother was pregnant for 11 months.

i probably would have gotten more from the book if i had read it instead of listening to it since the language is already difficult, but listening to books allows me to multitask with driving, cleaning, and other mindless tasks. i'll keep listening to these books even if it's difficult to understand at times.

after finishing the book, these links helped me make more sense of what i had read.

a summary of gargantua and pantagruel

good blogpost about gargantua and pantagruel

wikipedia article of gargantua and pantagruel