Book Nerd’s Comments (group member since Dec 20, 2018)

Book Nerd’s comments from the Never too Late to Read Classics group.

Welcome Abigail. The Illiad and Odyssesy are definitely worth reading.

Hi Martijn. Welcome to the group.
Yeah, more and more books always pop up.

That's interesting. Seems like she didn't really know much. She just kept seeing him having breakdowns.

Hi Jakub. Welcome to the group.

Frankenstein: The 1818 Text by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley


256 pages

Total to date: 5,646

It was painfully obvious that (view spoiler)[the creature was going to go after Elizabeth. (hide spoiler)]

All the flowery language at the end got a little tiresome.

And I wonder what it was that made Walton think Frankenstein was so "noble and godlike."

Basically just to advance science. He talked about wanting to eventually bring back the dead.

I'm halfway through my reread and really enjoying it.

I think the letters at the beginning are to make it seem like it's a story about arctic exploration. Same thing H.P. Lovecraft did at the beginning of At the Mountains of Madness.

I'm always trying to figure out how he actually made the creature. The movies always say stitched together corpses and even a lot of the descriptions on here say that. There's a tiny bit of evidence for that. It does mention him dissecting corpses.
But he was "making" the creature for month and it was eight feet tall and made of "inanimate matter". It almost seems more like some kind of golem. Back then it seems like they believed you could somehow bring nonliving matter to life through some scientific process. These days, of course, it would have been done by genetic engineering.

It's also odd that he said it was made to be beautiful but everybody finds it horrifying.

I have a file on my computer with every book I've read since 2003 so now I have twenty years of records! I finished putting them on goodreads a while ago.

Hi Hazel, welcome to the group.

The 1818 edition has 33 chapters.

I didn't read it in school either. I first read it in 2010.

I remember the movie The Witches. I definitely want to read the book.

Have fun. It's a good book.
You can tell which edition you have by the number of chapters. I'll check later.

Yeah, I have most of the kids books but I'd like to read at least some of the adult stuff. It sounds so different.

Pat the Book Goblin wrote: "@booknerd did Lesle or Rosemarie answer your question?"
Not yet.

I read these a few years ago. It was really interesting reading about that time.

Yeah, giant creatures are always fun but the story of the segregation of smarter humans sounds interesting too.

Annette wrote: "Clarke would be good. I’d nominate Octavia Butler but I’m not sure her works are old enough for this group. My second choice would be Jules Verne."
Yes, Octavia Butler isn't old enough but I loved the Xenogenesis trilogy so I'm reading the rest of her books this year. The good thing is there was only eleven more and she managed to write complex, deep stories without writing doorstops like many of today's writers.

Roald Dahlwas a British novelist, short story writer and screenwriter of Norwegian descent, who rose to prominence in the 1940's with works for both children and adults, and became one of the world's bestselling authors.

His first children's book was The Gremlins, about mischievous little creatures that were part of RAF folklore. The book was commissioned by Walt Disney for a film that was never made, and published in 1943. Dahl went on to create some of the best-loved children's stories of the 20th century, such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda and James and the Giant Peach.

He also had a successful parallel career as the writer of macabre adult short stories, usually with a dark sense of humour and a surprise ending. Many were originally written for American magazines such as Ladies Home Journal, Harper's, Playboy and The New Yorker, then subsequently collected by Dahl into anthologies, gaining world-wide acclaim. Dahl wrote more than 60 short stories and they have appeared in numerous collections, some only being published in book form after his death. His stories also brought him three Edgar Awards: in 1954, for the collection Someone Like You; in 1959, for the story "The Landlady"; and in 1980, for the episode of Tales of the Unexpected based on "Skin".
********************************************
Roald Dahl wrote seventeen novels for children and one collection was published.
He wrote twelve story collection for adults and two novels.
This will be a year long reading challenge. We'll see who can read them all.


Kids
The Gremlins 1943
James and the Giant Peach 1961
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory 1964
The Magic Finger 1966
Fantastic Mr Fox 1970
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator 1972
Danny, the Champion of the World 1975
The Enormous Crocodile 1978
The Twits 1980
George's Marvellous Medicine 1981
The BFG 1982
The Witches 1983
The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me 1985
Matilda 1988
Esio Trot 1990
The Vicar of Nibbleswicke 1991
The Minpins 1991
The Roald Dahl Treasury (collection) 1997

Adults
Over to You: Ten Stories of Flyers and Flying 1946
Sometime Never: A Fable for Supermen (novel) 1948
Someone Like You 1953
Kiss Kiss 1960
Twenty-Nine Kisses from Roald Dahl 1969
Switch Bitch 1974
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More 1977
The Best of Roald Dahl 1978
Tales of the Unexpected 1979
My Uncle Oswald (novel) 1979
More Tales of the Unexpected 1980
A Roald Dahl Selection: Nine Short Stories 1980
Two Fables 1986
Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life: The Country Stories of Roald Dahl 1989

I was about to put up the Roald Dahl thread. Should I put it here?