I finished Candide recently, and it is a brilliant book. And one which had I read when I was 18, might have saved me a great deal of time.
Essentially a chap of priviledged upbringing is punted into real life and tries to make sense of it all. He has a positive outlook, which sees ours as “the best of all possible worlds”, despite the tragedies and misfortunes he, and those around him, suffer. It boils down to the question, really, of
“I would be glad to know which is worst, to be ravished a hundred times by Negro pirates, to have one buttock cut off, to run the gauntlet among the Bulgarians, to be whipped and hanged at an auto-da-fe, to be dissected, to be chained to an oar in a galley; and, in short, to experience all the miseries through which every one of us hath passed, or to remain here doing nothing?”
“This,” said Candide, “is a grand question.”