John’s Comments (group member since Jan 24, 2014)

John’s comments from the IMO Knowledge Team Reads group.

Happy March all,

I wanted to mention something I noticed in starting this book, partly because I am curious if anyone else felt similarly, partly because I want to talk about this book.

I have not read this book before and my experiences with the wonderful world of Frankenstein is largely based on movies, TV, and parodies. I was not expecting the start to this book. To begin with, I was very thrown by the first few letters.

I was expecting pretty much anything other than a series of letters from some guy who is looking for a passage through the Arctic Circle. The focus on his expedition and past experiences in boating kind of threw me off. I found myself wondering where Igor was or what the point of these letters were.

I can certainly appreciate the approach for setting up a mechanism for the narrative that follows. I am not super familiar with how most literature was written in 1818, but I do recall that fiction written in novel form was still relatively young in terms of how we think of them today back in the early 1800's. I find it very interesting that in trying to capture a reader, Shelly begins the book by making it seem like something that really happened and is just a recount made by someone not directly involved in the story. I do not think something like that would fly these days since it takes a little while to get the story moving. But, it still set the tone pretty well for me.

I do not want to comment to far along in the story since I do not know how far everyone is. I will admit to being done with the book and that I really enjoyed it despite it depressing me.