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

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

Welcome Gayathri.

The Food of the Gods by H.G. Wells


147 pages

Total to date: 11,977

I finished. It was interesting but I didn't love it.
The later part was about the humans that grew huge. There's a lot about class struggles and people who don't fit into society.
The description of the book is wrong. They didn't have any "extraordinary mental powers".

I read The Gremlins.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiMy_...

It was a cute little story. What I liked most was the art.
Also the part about how it was supposed to be turned into a Disney movie was interesting. It made Disney seem like an evil empire even back then.

✅ 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
✅Boy
✅Going Solo
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

Evelyn wrote: "It’s actually 6 of his novels!!"

Is it this book?

I have that one and we're reading Food of the Gods now. I've read all of those except The Invisible Man.

Welcome Mike, Evelyn, and Phoebe.

I'm about halfway through it.
So far it's pretty much a "monster movie". There's a movie from 1976 that I'm pretty sure I've seen a long time ago. Sounds like one of those movies they used to play on Saturday afternoons.
If anybody's wondering "perambulator" means a stroller, which I'm pretty sure they shortened to "pram" in England. And a "stone" is 14 pounds or 6.35 kg.

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.