What Are You Reading

[Harp]

^ Reading that Knox link rendered hard verdict my capricious college years. A man has to
follow his own star, and an individual who has fixed inner sight upon the heavens for clear
understanding of himself finds purpose denied most men.

...I can recall standing at the Honolulu Art Museum Beretania & Ward corner about
two o'clock in the afternoon. The sun, breeze, and utter magnificence mixed the splendor
of youthful insouciance.

 

[Tiki Tom]

I just finished reading “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley, published in 1818 (275 pages).
As noted above, I’ve been avoiding Frankenstein for years. How can a book about a flat-headed monster with bolts in his neck be a classic?
But finally, I’d heard one too many book nerd tell me that it is more than a classic… Frankenstein is a foundational myth of the western world; it is the first example of the science fiction genre; the book is both gothic and romantic, and is loaded with deep psychological and sociological insights. Blah, blah, blah! But, okay, since it was October, I would read Frankenstein.

To my surprise, it really is very good. First, it’s nothing like the movie. Despite being 200 years old, the language is pretty easy to read. Frankenstein is more of a psychological thriller than a horror story. It does pit science (which was just coming into its own) against romantic notions like beauty and nature and the love of family. The book has a nice story arc that follows our ideas of beginning, middle, and end. The best part of the book, IMHO, is when it spends a couple of chapters telling the tale from the monster’s point of view. Oh, the humanity! I’ll bet that most readers can recall a period in their lives when they felt just like that monster. We also watch as doctor Victor Frankenstein slowly becomes more and more like his monster; cut off from society and captured by deep, ugly emotions. And there is more to it than that; as when the monster discovers the inner workings of humans and society. It is probably not stretching it too far to say that Mary Shelley was ahead of her time. And certain aspects of the story still resonate today.

As I said, it is a good read. If you are just embarking on reading the classics, you could do worse than starting with Frankenstein. It is fairly short and is divided up into quick chapters. It’s amazing that Mary Shelley wrote it when she was just 19. There’s a lot of backstory that gives the book additional weight: Mary Shelley grew up without a mother, and it’s noteworthy that the monster rages at being abandoned by its parent.

On the down side, Frankenstein does get off to a fairly slow start. The monster is only created around page 50. And for my tastes, Dr Frankenstein spends too much time whining about how miserable he is. But these are fairly small quibbles.

All that aside, human hubris being what it is, after reading Frankenstein, I now feel smugly “in the know” whenever an allusion to Frankenstein comes up. (For starters, I always thought that Dr Frankenstein was German. He is not. He is Swiss). Kinda fun, and well worth reading.