Mike > Recent Status Updates

Oh jeez. This is going to be depressing, for one reason or another.

I just read the last story in the book, and it was rather nice. There are a lot of remarkable people whose stories are documented here.

Shelley sure does know how to do melodrama. I guess your enjoyment of this book will depend on your enjoyment of overdramatic emotionality.

I would love to read more detailed interviews with all of these people. Obviously, the historians are working with what they have, but I wish we had so much more.

Ah, another story where every government involved is the bad guy. Fun times!

I guess this plothole kind of bothers me. The doctor is afraid of what happens if he builds a companion monster, but he doesn't seem to consider AT ALL that this will result in the monster taking revenge. Like, why doesn't that even factor into his decision-making?

I honestly have no idea why this is even read. It only makes me wish that we had more of the actual poems - these fragments do nothing for me at all.

The monster's story is so sad and so well-written. Easily the highlight of this book. I have to write an essay about why the doctor is the modern Prometheus, but I would honestly much rather write about why people relate to the monster, which I think is the reason people still like this book.

I think it means a lot, in terms of getting an understanding of Middle Eastern history, to actually hear the voices behind it. I'm glad that this last story I read was actually co-written by the person who lived through it. Very useful.

I honestly think this book might've been more interesting if it had been told entirely from the perspective of the monster. His section is the most riveting in this book.

I am very curious as to what this would be like as a Broadway show. I find this profoundly difficult to picture.

This is one of the best autobiographies I've ever read. There's so much to discuss here - you rarely see memoirs with this much symbolism and so much care put into the order the events are presented in.

This is not at all what I was expecting, but I'm enjoying it a fair bit. It's kind of an odd mix of a serious, semi-literary autobiography and newspaper cartoon style artwork. I'm not sure if the combination works, exactly, but each of the elements are certainly great on their own.

I am really struggling to fathom why this book has had such an impact on people. Like, even if I liked it, I would still think that it's so low-key and underwhelming.

The story about the Palestinian man was interesting, although I think the author skimmed over the best parts - I wanted to hear more about the various jobs he worked.

It's so weird to me that Shelley thinks this story is about fate. This disaster was so completely avoidable by Frankenstein at nearly every stage of the monster's creation.

I think I'm finally starting to understand why some people love Victorian novels so much. The unironic melodrama is honestly a little thrilling. I really do love this book - it's just as good now as when I first read it.

Is this really it? I really thought there was some kind of big shift in mood coming, but over halfway through the book, it's not here yet, and I'm starting to think it's not coming. If this is all that this book has to offer, I'm forced to conclude that it's way too subtle to be in any way effective.

Alright, there are still more twists coming, but I know a little more now. Yeah, I really do think this book's reveals are just too gradual for its own good. There's not enough to keep me intrigued - honestly, if I didn't have to read this for school, I don't know if I'd be still reading.

I think this book might just be too subtle for its own good. It seems to be going for something like opening of The Giver, half trying to trick the reader into a false sense of normalcy, half giving hints that something is off in this world and there's going to be a twist later. But the sense that things are off here just isn't strong enough, and I'm not intrigued to learn more like I was in The Giver.

I assume something interesting must happen at some point, because so many people like this book. But I'm really, really struggling to imagine how this could possibly be leading up to anything interesting. It's not boring exactly, it's just... so ridiculously low stakes, by every metric possible. I hope the payoff is worth it - it's rarely a good sign when a book's early chapters strike me as pointless.

I guess this is short enough that it's not a problem that literally nothing happens in this play. It is pretty philosophically interesting, and I've never seen any classic work that so openly acknowledges how tyrannic Zeus was.

So this is pretty interesting so far, but like... Prometheus doesn't literally stay chained to this rock the whole play, does he? Because I imagine this would get old quickly.

I feel like this is going to be either exceptionally interesting or exceptionally boring. I sense a twist coming, and it all depends on how good the twist is.

The chapter about the truck driver is really fascinating. I feel like I could write a story based on that guy's life.

Yeah, this is really good, in a way that's very difficult to describe. I feel like I should find this hack-y, but no, it's really getting to me.

I think I like this a lot, even though I feel like I've read a lot of things with a very similar writing style. Maybe I'm just a sucker for slightly surreal suburban postmodern stories.

What's the point of this book? Does Hamilton have a thesis, other than 'Ancient Greece was great'? If that is the thesis, how is it proven by pointing to a couple of playwrights as if they're representative of over a thousand years of history, in which most of the people weren't as educated as these playwrights?

In a different context, Hamilton's analysis of why tragedies are important and the styles of different tragic playwrights would work pretty well - it isn't great or anything, but she does have some insight. But in the context of a book that's supposed to reveal something significant about Greek culture and thought, it's almost completely useless.

To think that you can make a meaningful statement about the literature of two cultures by finding commonalities between a single author from each one is beyond asinine. But then again, this is the first time in this book where Hamilton has actually attempted to explain why a certain culture is the way it is, and to contextualize the kind of thought on display from a culture, so I'll call this a stronger chapter.