If you’re around here a lot, you may have noticed that I have a thing for stories about people who are rejected, not for their deeds, but because they are somehow different. The Phantom of the Opera, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and the Creature of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
I can’t remember the last time I read Frankenstein…college, maybe? Not as an assignment, just around that time. My chief memory was that I enjoyed the book, but I hated Victor. I recently reread the book, and…yeah. Really good book. Hated Victor.
Victor Frankenstein, already a dying man as the story opens, imparts to the reader the tale of what laid him low. After an idyllic childhood in his native Geneva, he went off to college and pursued an obsession with the “natural sciences.” This culminated in an experiment in which he successfully gave life to a creature he fashioned. Victor is horrified by the Creature’s ugliness the moment he comes to life, and flees the laboratory. The Creature disappears and Victor, with a shudder, goes about his life–until his young brother is murdered, and Victor realizes the Creature is to blame. More tragedies later, Creature and creator confront one another at last, and in an extended story-within-the-story, the Creature relates his experiences. (Unlike the movie version, he’s extremely eloquent.) He sought acceptance and instead was met with rejection, until at last he turned with rage upon his creator. And from there we enter what could almost be a Shakespearean tragedy, with the body count rising and the “hero” falling apart in mind and body. Continue reading “Book Review: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley”
Years ago, whenever it first came out, I saw the movie The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and thought vaguely that I ought to read the book. Much more recently, I was hunting for a new audiobook, and my library chanced to have the first book of Sisterhood by Ann Brashares (read by Angela Goethals) sitting on the shelf—so I listened to it, and then went on to listen to the other four books in the series too.
Sometimes it’s a book title that draws me in, and that was definitely the case for today’s book: Dear Luke, We Need To Talk, Darth – and Other Pop Culture Correspondences by John Moe. It’s rather a long title, but it does pretty much encapsulate the book–a series of letters, interview transcripts and journals, putting a new slant on familiar movies, TV shows and songs.
Tales of the Marvelous 