Marcus Aurelius - Meditations: Adapted for the Contemporary Reader

Nice and thick pages, can’t see the text on the other side. Attractive and heavy hard cover. The font is big enough to be a comfortable read.That being said, if you’re in a hard place in life, this book can change your life.

This book is amazing from the start, no b.s no shortcut.. it enlightens at ease with no gimmicks and I’ve read a lot of books

Marcus is an amazing person to follow

I recommend everyone read this book.

Incredibly easy read yet deeply meaningful concepts. You may find a certain familiarity in the logic despite having no direct experience with works of Marcus Aurelius. Actually quite a page-turner.

No complaints looking forward to reading this book

I've always been interested in Roman history. And one of the wonders of books, is that you can pick one up and read the thoughts of someone who lived 2000 years ago.I do not think I need to add to the many comments here praising the wisdom of Marcus Aurelius. I do want to say that it's great to have his ideas presented in a more "accessible" way for modern readers.I have a copy of "The Great Books" circa 1950 of "Meditations". And while purists may feel that having it EXACTLY in the way it was written, they also need to realize that "getting the thought across" needs to evolve. And that can be done without destroying the original thought.I'm a pretty well-read person. But reading the "classic" translations of this (and other) authors can be daunting. In the case of my "classic" copy of Meditations, I increasing found all those "thee's" and "thou's" and "wheretofore's " off-putting. I greatly appreciate the work of James Harris in modifying this archaic usage. It makes it much easier for people today to understand.And for "Latin purists" out there---even in Marcus's time, his manner of speech and writing was considered "high-flown" and getting a bit long in the tooth. The Latin of the 2nd century was already changing, and in the next two centuries would change even more. (That's how French, Spanish, and Italian became the languages that they are today).The book is nicely bound with a heavy black cover. I also liked that it was well-wrapped and shipped in a box, instead of just some padded shipping envelope.

Anyone who has ever read Marcus Aurelius' Meditations can tell you that the original translation is very hard to read. If you can whiz through Shakespeare with no issues, you'll likely be okay with it. However it is quite a chore to read ... and then re-read ... the pages trying to figure out what exactly is being said. So much so that often I can only get through a few pages before I have to stop and take a break.I was pretty excited to see a more modern translation available ... at first I was afraid it might take away from the original message not to have a literal translation from Latin. Then I remembered that even the original translation from Latin was done years after the original text, which also was probably heavily translated into Latin.Sadly, this is still a chore to read and understand. Maybe a little less so than the original text ... but I feel like a much better job could have been done to make it more understandable without losing the original message and intent.The biggest issue I have with this is the layout. It is terrible. The text fills the entire page from top to bottom and often is an entire block of text with no paragraphs or any kind of pleasing layout. As I got through the first few pages, I wondered which was worse ... getting through the very old-fashioned language of the original edition ... or getting through the slightly modernized language with the horrible layout of this edition. I may actually prefer the original edition.It is as if someone printed this book as a word document on their computer and it didn't quite match the size layout. There's nothing else to say except it looks unappealing and amateur. As others have said, it also contains pretty obvious grammatical errors .. likely no editor went over this. It seems like a college book report that was done the evening before it was due.The original copy of the book I had was the one with the black background and closeup of the Aurelius's head from the horse statue. I think I slightly prefer that to this. It might have been cool to have a copy with annotations at the bottom which gave a brief summary of other people's history whom Aurelius mentions. I found myself going to the internet to look up Sextus and other figures Aurelius mentions.The content itself is fairly stunning. There is no doubt Aurelius was ahead of his time ... and he seems to be a very disciplined and simple person. I find that it would be difficult to be a ruler of Rome in that day and forgo a lot of the luxuries of that position. At one point Aurelius mentions being happy with a plank and a sheet for a bed and not wearing his 'outdoor' clothes in the house.Other lessons in humility, temperance, pride, anger, emotion, moderation, etc. show the reader an interesting flip side to many of the more interesting leaders of Rome ... Caligula and Tiberius' licentiousness ... Nero's greed ... Julius Caesar's lust of power, etc. I would put this book up there with Machiaveli and Tsun Tzu in terms of applicable life lessons. It is no wonder that Aurelius' lessons are catching on today.Overall, this is not the book I had hoped it would be. It has only slightly simplified the original translation ... reading this book is still like putting a puzzle together. The layout is terrible and I probably would skip this edition. If you are absolutely stumped by the original translation, it might help you a bit ... but don't expect to pick this up and be able to have an enjoyable read from cover to cover. You'll still need to work for these lessons.