The basic idea is great, but I had problems with the execution. The novel originated with a large amount of correspondence (letters). I don't like that, and Shelley used it quite a bit. The other thing I had trouble with is the long eloquent monologues of the monster. Seemed sorta absurd to me. Even more absurd than Frankenstein resurrecting the monster.
You mention Don Quixote, too. It's a true classic, a great satire of the knight in shining armor, but I found it horribly boring. Could not get past the duel with the windmill.
Frankenstein was one of the first Victorian novels and thus one of the first novels period so you should keep that in mind. Same goes for Don Quixote. Their writing style was quite a bit more verbose and literate than more modern writers. Hell, their letters were longer than some modern novels. Maybe if you stuck to the Hardy Boys mysteries it would be more your speed and never boring!
Last edited by Alan Evil on Wed May 04, 2005 1:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
[size=75]You are as bad as Alan, and even he hits the mark sometimes. -charlie
"Not all conservatives are stupid, but most stupid people are conservative." - John Stuart Mill[/size]
Wes wrote:I read constantly. I usually read a novel straight through if I am into it. Usually pop fiction or philosophy stuff.
Such as? What do you mean by pop fiction? Cyber sci-fi like Gibson's Neuromancer? What kind of philosophy? Nietzsche? I'm sorta into him here recently.
kato wrote:Uncle Tungsten - Oliver Sachs
Pillars of the Earth - Follett
Walking the Bible - Feiler (and anything written by him)
What Just Happened - Gleick (and anything written by him)
More sci-fi than I can list (plowed through all of James White's books this winter)
....and I hesitate to mention this here, but every year around this time, I get the next volume in C.S.Forester's Horatio Hornblower series.
Waiting on H.H.George Martin's next and J.K.Rowling's next.
George Martin rocks. Dat's some dark stuff. And where does he get the nerve to kill off major characters? Robert Jordan would never do a thing like that.
Pillars of the Earth was good, but the on-again off-again relationship between the architect and the wool woman got sorta repetitive. I also had a hard time believing that he could gain the experience to build cathedrals so quickly. Guess the first one tumbling down meant that he didn't. The history of the time and the attention to the lives of the people was superb. So much history doesn't give you a feel for this.
A nonfiction book that's pretty decent on the era perhaps a couple hundred years later, right before the Renaissance, is A World Lit Only By Fire, by William Manchester. Those early Popes knew how to party.
Patterson, John Sanford, Clive Cussler, etc for fiction. Easy reading.
Philosophy wise, I read a lot of Buddhist stuff, along with some *new age* (whatever that means, but that is where they put the books) stuff. Dan Millman, Carlos Casadita, etc.
But, lately, mostly I have been into stuff with lots of pictures - Magazines and Photography how-to and collections.
Zspider wrote:
Wes wrote:I read constantly. I usually read a novel straight through if I am into it. Usually pop fiction or philosophy stuff.
Such as? What do you mean by pop fiction? Cyber sci-fi like Gibson's Neuromancer? What kind of philosophy? Nietzsche? I'm sorta into him here recently.
ZSpider
Last edited by Wes on Wed May 04, 2005 2:02 am, edited 1 time in total.
kafish2 wrote:Huggy... in a poll of the CEOs of the fortune 500 hundred companies over most influential book first place was the Bible and a close second was atlas shrugged. I am not a fan of rand's thinking but I thought since you brought her up this would be a nice thing to note.
"I been Ayn Randed, nearly branded, Communist cuz I'm left-handed." Gotta love her. Her objectivism served as philosophical justification for greed and selfishness. She was a big fan of Mickey Spillane. Rumor was that they might have had a thing going.
Zspider wrote:The other thing I had trouble with is the long eloquent monologues of the monster. Seemed sorta absurd to me. Even more absurd than Frankenstein resurrecting the monster.
If you didn't like that, stay away from Dracula. I don't remember much about it except that much of it is correspondence and there isn't much point in reading the book if you already know that Dracula is a vampire. They spend a lot of time working up to what is painfully obvious to us today.
I have to disagree about the eloquent monologues, though. Hollywood completely butchered the point of the book even going so far as to change the names of Dr. F and his friend so that the main character wouldn't be called Victor during the height of the cold war. I do agree that the science is just a little flaky, but the total point of the book is about responsibility for one's actions and the power of creating life in any form. If the monster had not been able to communicate so well the story would be about the same as trying to stop a runaway chemistry experiment and there really wouldn't have been much of a plot. It's like Alan said, it's victorian and most of that stuff is pretty flowery by today's standards.
I think back a few posts the lemon squeezer morphed the thread into a recommendations list. I'm not much into making recommendations. Reading preferences are highly subjective. But I can mention a few novels that I was most impressed with.
The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway
Catch-22, Heller
A Garden of Sand, Thompson
Blood Meridian, McCarthy
Solo Faces, Salter
Blood Meridian would repulse most people. Many would find Hemingway's novel boring and pointless. The last one might be of interest to the group, though, since it's a climbing novel. I believe it has some parallels to the life of Gary Hemming.
