autobiography of benjamin franklin... worth reading?

[underground]

anyone here who has read it? i tried to read the first thirty pages of it last night, but the Random Capitalization eventually Got to Me. it's like franklin feels the need to capitalize every other noun for whatever valid yet obscure reason he has. there are also a lot of rambling, and after flipping through the book, i would guess there's no real structure at all (just his life story in chronological order). will the book get better eventually? or should i skip to a more worthwhile book?

good think he was an inventor, not a writer.

[Shannanigan]

Back in the days Franklin wrote the autobiography, most nouns were capitalized if they were thought to have some special value. The wordiness was also the style of the time, a well-worded (today's overwordy) essay or book was the "formal" way of writing for the time.

I haven't read his autobiography, so I can't tell you if it gets better, but may I ask, what made you want to read it? Did you read a modern biography of him to get an idea of what kind of things you will be reading about?

[aeroport]

This isn't terribly important, but, as a side-note, the Germans still capitalize every noun.

[Schokokeks]

This isn't terribly important, but, as a side-note, the Germans still capitalize every noun.

Yeah, but we capitalise every noun, not every other ;) But there are spelling reform discussions ever going on about this, so who knows, in one year's time we'll probably be writing like as arbitrary as Franklin (again) :D

I haven't read Franklin's Autobiography yet, but so far I was planning to do so, as he always passed as a witty man in my opinion, though I don't know where I got that idea from in the first place :)
In case you'll pick it up again, underground, I'd like to hear your final verdict when you're done :nod:.

[SleepyWitch]

I read a couple of chapters a couple of years ago and quite liked it. I didn't mind the rambling too much at the time...
I thought his writing style and overall tone were somehow typically American, as in down-to-earth, pragmatic, patriotic, interested in everyday stuff...