Why you should read Rabelais

When's the last time you read a book with the thought, where has this book been all my life?

Those for whom it's been a very long time, and for those for whom that time has never come, are urged to read Gargantua and Pantagreul as soon as they can, like right now, before the world ends or before they die, whichever may come first.

Gargantua and Pantagreul (father and son giants) is actually composed of five books, the first of which has a title page which reads,

The First Book The Most Fearsome Life of THE GREAT Gargantua  Father of Pantagruel

Composed Many Years Ago by Master Alcofribas   Abstractor of the Quintessence

A Book Full of Pantagruelism

Opening the book a reader will see immediately that it's a book to like, as the book itself seems to be laughing out loud at the very beginning, and a reader needs to laugh, it being so dfficult to live in a world without laughter while living in a world other people have made so difficult for other people to live in.

Written in the early 16th century by a Frenchman, Gargantua and Pantagruel is oddly contemporary; the 'news' of the day seems to be on every page in both exaggerated and unexaggerated form.

I've just come to the place in the First Book when Gargantua has come to Paris as a young giant. After getting liquored up, he finds a place to rest atop Cathedral Notre Dame and pisses "so fiercely that he drowned two hundred and sixty thousand four hundred and eighteen persons, not counting the women and children."