The thirty-eighth book: #38 Emile - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I struggled with this book. It's not really a novel, more a treatise on how to raise a boy left in your charge. It's about ways to do it, techniques and plans for it. But there's no real story here, characters are flimsy and more strawmen to create point, except for some anecdotes that intersperse the explanations and justification. A lot of it is dated, parts of it I disagree with, and everyone is idealized to show how things would go. I'm sure a lot of the advice would go different based on who it's being done to. At the same time, there are parts that feel ahead of their time, and are interesting to see how some now normal practices seem to have been different at the time.
Still, this isn't a novel, there is no story and there are no real characters, and on the whole it's just boring to read. Sure, it might be influential, but it doesn't feel like it matters much as a novel - more as a work of non-fiction. And fiction is what I was looking for.