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maderrIf by some weird chance you do not already know this, I am obsessed with Frankenstein. The only book I love more is Jekyll & Hyde and really I should probably say they draw equal.
I read it in highschool, though not for highschool, because my teachers there didn't think such bucks were worth anything - we read The Crucible, The Scarlet Letter, Raisins in the Sun, and goddamned fucking Tess of the d'Ubervilles*
All the cool books I read on my own, minus the obligatory 1984**, a few Dickens, about the only taste my highschool teachers had -- and that only because their teaching manuals and certain NC requirements for our exams required it.
Maybe I'm a little bitter about my highschool education. The only shit I ever learned was what they never taught.
I digress.
I no longer remember why I finally read Frankenstein, only that I was completely in love with it. Until then I only knew the Hollywood crap that everyone knew, and it was quite a thrill to read something else entirely. I love Victor, his obsessions, I love his monster in all his (now cliche) misundestood misery.
Maybe about the fourth time I read it, I finally realized that Shelley never really cleared up what happened to one of the characters -- Ernest.
Everyone else dies. Victor's fiance, his father, his youngest brother, his best friend -- all of them. But Ernest, his younger brother, lives. The book I just finished reading mentions that Shelley changed him bit when she made revisions to the book, making him stronger and all - but she never says what becomes of him.
Obviously it's not important to the story, which is about Victor and his monster, but it still has always bugged me. What would a man like that do? To know that his entire family is dead, and all because of some shit his golden-boy older brother did? Everything he knows is dead and gone, his brother gone mad and gone to chase after the monster...
I always wished someone would write a story about Ernest. I wish I was up to the task. Alas, historical settings are not my forte and I'm not quite brave enough to try it anyway
I'm more than willing to write Unequal Children, which in my mind is the only dark fairytale-ish story I'll ever write, and abuse all the dark books and stories I love, but I don't think I'm up to writing a story about Ernest. If one alrady exists, I have never heard of it, though I would love to.
Anyway, if anyone has not been bored to tears by my silly fangirl ramblings, the book that got me started was The Monsters by Dorothy & Thomas Hoobler. It was a solid read -- not happy, or sparkly, but given how much I love the works of the persons involved, I wanted to read it. I tend not to learn much about writers and poets, given that if I were ever famous I would hate to know how much of my life people know. Still, they're dead, I figure I'd be beyond caring at that point too. I highly reccomend it.
*I loathe, despise, detest, and hate this book with the fury and passion of a thousand burnng suns. Precious few books in my life have sparked such a reaction, and poor, enduring Sammikins will tell you I can rant for length about it. Tess is fucking stupid, and that's all I feel like saying on the matter. One of these days I guess I should reread it, as I was only in highschool when I first read it, but I'm not kidding when I say just thinking of the book turns my vision blood red. Maybe my chicks get repetitive in their independence and all, but at least they're not as stupid as goddamn fucking Tess.
**I loved 1984, I love the general premise and read/watch just about everything concering such ideas. Likes fairytales and certain other premises, it's one that will never bore me. There's something else I always think about when 1984 comes up though, concering Frankenstien and my stupid goddamn hs teachers. We had to write a final paper, comparing two books/plays/poems, and we could choose whatever we wanted. I chose Frankenstein for one, but could not think of a good book with which to compare it, as I wanted to find something to contrast Victor, since I thought it would be cool to explore his character. My teacher's brilliant suggestion when I went to her for help? 'Do 1984' (which we had *just* finished reading) =_= I had to go to a teacher in another class, a teacher I didn't know, to get help. One of his suggestions was the play Pygmalion - which most know as My Fair Lady. Pretty cool, eh?
I'll shut up now.
I read it in highschool, though not for highschool, because my teachers there didn't think such bucks were worth anything - we read The Crucible, The Scarlet Letter, Raisins in the Sun, and goddamned fucking Tess of the d'Ubervilles*
All the cool books I read on my own, minus the obligatory 1984**, a few Dickens, about the only taste my highschool teachers had -- and that only because their teaching manuals and certain NC requirements for our exams required it.
Maybe I'm a little bitter about my highschool education. The only shit I ever learned was what they never taught.
I digress.
I no longer remember why I finally read Frankenstein, only that I was completely in love with it. Until then I only knew the Hollywood crap that everyone knew, and it was quite a thrill to read something else entirely. I love Victor, his obsessions, I love his monster in all his (now cliche) misundestood misery.
Maybe about the fourth time I read it, I finally realized that Shelley never really cleared up what happened to one of the characters -- Ernest.
Everyone else dies. Victor's fiance, his father, his youngest brother, his best friend -- all of them. But Ernest, his younger brother, lives. The book I just finished reading mentions that Shelley changed him bit when she made revisions to the book, making him stronger and all - but she never says what becomes of him.
Obviously it's not important to the story, which is about Victor and his monster, but it still has always bugged me. What would a man like that do? To know that his entire family is dead, and all because of some shit his golden-boy older brother did? Everything he knows is dead and gone, his brother gone mad and gone to chase after the monster...
I always wished someone would write a story about Ernest. I wish I was up to the task. Alas, historical settings are not my forte and I'm not quite brave enough to try it anyway
I'm more than willing to write Unequal Children, which in my mind is the only dark fairytale-ish story I'll ever write, and abuse all the dark books and stories I love, but I don't think I'm up to writing a story about Ernest. If one alrady exists, I have never heard of it, though I would love to.
Anyway, if anyone has not been bored to tears by my silly fangirl ramblings, the book that got me started was The Monsters by Dorothy & Thomas Hoobler. It was a solid read -- not happy, or sparkly, but given how much I love the works of the persons involved, I wanted to read it. I tend not to learn much about writers and poets, given that if I were ever famous I would hate to know how much of my life people know. Still, they're dead, I figure I'd be beyond caring at that point too. I highly reccomend it.
*I loathe, despise, detest, and hate this book with the fury and passion of a thousand burnng suns. Precious few books in my life have sparked such a reaction, and poor, enduring Sammikins will tell you I can rant for length about it. Tess is fucking stupid, and that's all I feel like saying on the matter. One of these days I guess I should reread it, as I was only in highschool when I first read it, but I'm not kidding when I say just thinking of the book turns my vision blood red. Maybe my chicks get repetitive in their independence and all, but at least they're not as stupid as goddamn fucking Tess.
**I loved 1984, I love the general premise and read/watch just about everything concering such ideas. Likes fairytales and certain other premises, it's one that will never bore me. There's something else I always think about when 1984 comes up though, concering Frankenstien and my stupid goddamn hs teachers. We had to write a final paper, comparing two books/plays/poems, and we could choose whatever we wanted. I chose Frankenstein for one, but could not think of a good book with which to compare it, as I wanted to find something to contrast Victor, since I thought it would be cool to explore his character. My teacher's brilliant suggestion when I went to her for help? 'Do 1984' (which we had *just* finished reading) =_= I had to go to a teacher in another class, a teacher I didn't know, to get help. One of his suggestions was the play Pygmalion - which most know as My Fair Lady. Pretty cool, eh?
I'll shut up now.
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Date: 2006-09-23 04:19 pm (UTC)It's really amazing how much it depends on the teacher if you like a book read in school or not. I only liked one book I read in English, and it was "The Giver". Of course that was the choice of the only decent English teacher I ever had.
It was the same in German. One teacher I really like, and he was the only one who gave us decent books and plays (except for "Crazy", but he did not like that one either).
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Date: 2006-09-23 04:20 pm (UTC)Which apparently has the different "versions" of Ernest in ther early versions of the novels.
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Date: 2006-09-23 04:29 pm (UTC)Heh. It's always cool to find someone who feels exactly opposite about things.
It never fails to amaze me how often "I hate X book" is followed by "b/c I had an awful english teacher" All the stuff I really liked was the stuff my teachers wanted no part of, or the things they hated but made us read b/c the book said they had to -- like The Canterbury Tales and Beowulf. My teacaher wouldn't let us say "slut" or "whore" when we read sections aloud, we had to say 's-word' or something.
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Date: 2006-09-23 04:51 pm (UTC)O_o;; Are you serious? Dude! These books are hard enough to slog through when they're just the required and whatever. I mean, using those words would at least appeal a little to the subversive rebel effect which might actually make them appear to be interesting...if just in that secretly 'putting the screws to The Man' kind of way. Seriously. Talk about alienating the kids you're supposed to be engaging and promoting the book to. >_>
Do they not realize that at that age half the appeal of anything is the lure of the forbidden? I mean, honestly, tell them that the book you're making them read is on the list of banned books at that, in spite of all the parental complaints, you're presenting it to them because you think they're smart enough and intelligent enough to read it and form their own opinions instead of being slaves to parents who are all about 'protecting the ickle babies'. Even if it's not a banned book, the point is, it at least would have some kind of appeal.
Not saying slut or whore...what are we in the eighteenth century? >_>
I've never read 1984, but I read Brave New World and from what I understand, they're both about dystopias. The teacher who had us read that one was a total fruitcake, and I didn't like it at the time, but in retrospect, it really is a kickass book.
Grrr. I wanted to read Beowulf. (Oh no, instead of Beowulf, I get Dante's Inferno, possibly the most boring book known to man where a guy spends a bajillion pages putting all his Italian enemies who died centuries ago in rings of hell in some demented form of passive agressive literature...) I tried reading it on my own, but if there's not a picture of a half naked guy hugging some chick who can't keep her dress up over a shoulder on the cover, then I seem to be unable to keep my attention focused long enough to finish it. ^_^;;
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Date: 2006-09-23 04:51 pm (UTC)Dude, just be glad you never read Billy Budd. *twitch* "Oh, the beautiful sailor, beloved by all his shipmates." heh, I'll bet he was...
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Date: 2006-09-23 04:56 pm (UTC)And I always wanted to read the Canterbury tales or Beowulf. It's really funny, but I can halfway understand English from the Middle Ages, but German from that time... more cryptic than the German Shakespeare translations (harder to understand than the original).
My teachers would always have us read books they liked, like the last book "The Sunday I became World Champion", a book liked by people who like football, are from the Protestant south and were around ten in 1954 (like our teacher). Unfortunately, most of us neither liked football that much, our school was in the north and we were all a tad bit too young. But that did not stop our teacher.
I really like the stuff we had in 9th and 10th grade though. "Andorra" by Frisch, "Galileo Galilei" by Brecht (we even listened to what he said when questioned by McCarthy) and "Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum" (one of the greatest books ever, Böll did deserve his Nobel Price). But the rest... I did not even like "Faust", like most other people do.
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Date: 2006-09-23 04:57 pm (UTC)She also had her teacher's assistant go through all the class copies of Gilgamesh and black out all the parts in the beginning that referenced the prostitute and whatever they might have done together and the word whore.
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Date: 2006-09-23 04:59 pm (UTC)I like bitching about Dickens. I don't hate the man, and he was better than some of the other things inflicted upon us. His books are tedious, but they're fun to bitch about. And I will forever think it funny that he was utterly pwned by his fans to the point he changed the ending of GE because they said DO IT OR ELSE BITCH.
I am eternally grateful that book was never on my reading lists. And we all know exactly what they thought of beautiful Billy Budd. Between that and MD, if anyone thought Melville was straight...they were obviousy idiots.
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Date: 2006-09-23 05:01 pm (UTC)Great Expectations on the other hand...I've never finished a book where I wanted to cheerfully maim and stab a character for having so much promise and then blowing it completely over some utterly worthless, superficial bimbo chickie. Seriously. I could have written a ten page essay on ways in which to kill Pip for being a whiny idiot brat.
*snickers* I'll bet he was too. I mean, if they're going to be like that, than they should at least be beloveding some pants off. *sigh* This is the problem with required school reading. There's just never enough torrid sex. Or instances where things of an exciting nature happen.
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Date: 2006-09-23 05:04 pm (UTC)where a guy spends a bajillion pages putting all his Italian enemies who died centuries ago in rings of hell in some demented form of passive agressive literature
*howls with laughter*
That is the single most beautiful description of Dante I have ever heard in my life. I never read all of it, though I mean to - but my knowledge of Italian politics is nonexistant, so most of the book is lost on me.
Heh. Some of the classic stuff can be hard to read. I read it all b/c it never occured to me not to read everything in my lit books - I was always about six lessons ahead of everyone, including the teacher.
Sammie just has an affinity for the stuff. Total academic that girl; she even reads the Oddessey like its nothing and that fucker is hard.
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Date: 2006-09-23 05:06 pm (UTC)I wish schools here were that laid back.
Sounds like you read some cool stuff.
Ahahaha, I don't think we're destined to agree insofar as literature goes. I adore Faust - it's another one of those I found on my own and I've read it like eight times. It'd be cool to be able to read it in the original german, but alas I'm not that talented.
I think a book on football would have bored me to tears.
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Date: 2006-09-23 05:10 pm (UTC)We love to rant about Great Expectations. My biggest beef with Dickens -- and King actually shares this trait, oddly enough -- is that he will go on for fucking ever about the dumbest shit. I wish I had my old copy, I'd marked where in the book he goes on for AN ENTIRE PAGE about the leaves on a tree.
That sounds like a beautiful essay. I would help write it. My favorite character was the batty old lady who went up in flames.
Basically. I'm all about plot over pr0n, but several of those books are a good example of where smexxing would have improved things, or at least kept the readers awake that much longer. Especially with Melville, where fucking everyone is gay and they're trapped on ships, hunting SPERM WHALES AND HARVESTING THEIR FAT, and what? They played whist? Even in hs I wasn't that fucking naive.
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Date: 2006-09-23 05:10 pm (UTC)Aha, that's the greatest characterization I've ever heard of Pip. I think my teacher like to tout him as some sort of... I don't know, moral character. (But then she also thought Oedipus was a strong character, so I'm not sure her opinion counts for much.)
The way every other paragraph noted his beauty and how all the other sailors "admired him so much" and were "so friendly" with him, I'm honestly surprised there wasn't some more explicit loving going on. But I guess with the murder trial and its being all of maybe 80 pages, Melville just couldn't quite fit it in.
That or the people way back when made him cut it out. You never know, maybe it was a hundred pages longer and chock full of teh man secks.
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Date: 2006-09-23 05:10 pm (UTC)AHAHAHAHAHAH I'd forgotten all that.
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Date: 2006-09-23 05:12 pm (UTC)...okay, far be it for me to point out the absurdity of the situation. Man, that had to have sucked.
Oh. My. God. Stop! You're hurting my poor brain. It kills me that these people become teachers. I mean, could they miss the point any farther? O_o;; Geez. I mean, why stop at blacking out the words, why not just commence with the burning of the pile of books? *headdesk* I take it Fahrenheit 451 wasn't on the required reading list?
And to think, you and Maderr ended up being such kickass cool people of a literary persuasion in spite of everything. *tackle glomps* ^_________^ Heehee. Rebels.
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Date: 2006-09-23 05:13 pm (UTC)Good ol' Kafka. I hate him as much as Thomas Hardy.
Oedipus had all the strength of a flattened feather pillow.
*dies laughing* I would kill to see that conversation:
Melville: But it's hot sex.
Editor: Get rid of it. Totally not appropriate.
Melville: HOT MAN SEX
Editor: TAKE IT OUT OR I'LL MAKE SURE YOU'RE ARRESTED
Melville: FINE! *pouts*
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Date: 2006-09-23 05:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-23 05:18 pm (UTC)Sammie and I have long given up understanding why our school hired half the teachers it did.
Hee hee hee. Sammie, did you read that? We're of a literary persuasion ^___^
More like we're just bitchy and like to say that man of the so-called classics would look better in the fireplace.
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Date: 2006-09-23 05:22 pm (UTC)Basically yeah. *shrug* Somehow, they always missed the
lack oflogic in that.I don't think she really liked that Fahrenheit 451 was on the AP reading list, and she was pretty damned certain we wouldn't be reading it in her class. No, no. We read more exciting and invigorating things like Things Fall Apart and The City of Joy.
We had some good teachers here or there to help balance it out, and y'know... if they sniffed and said "I don't approve" well of course we had to find out why. ^_~
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Date: 2006-09-23 05:23 pm (UTC)She was the one cool character in the whole thing. She was just fascinating, and she made no bones about who she was or what she was doing to chickie girl. Pip just grated on my nerves SO much. I wanted to smack him. Really, really hard.
s that he will go on for fucking ever about the dumbest shit.
Oh my god yes. Yes, yes. My teacher would give us vocab words from each chapter and we'd have to find them in the chapter and it would take freaking FOREVER because he never used them in any kind of interesting, memorable context. It was always in some sentance that had enough semi-colons to start it's own semi-colon army of doom that was about basically nothing that pertained to anything. My friends and I (and pretty much everyone in class) called it Great Disappointments. My one friend even scratched out the Expectation on her copy so that she could write in Disappointments.
XD
"Hey, would you like raunchy sex?"
"No thanks. I find that a nice game of whist calms the raging beast in my breast just fine."
Seriously, reading this? You guys should have gone to my HS. We read some cracked books, but compared to your teachers mine were liberal as hell.
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Date: 2006-09-23 05:24 pm (UTC)And I think my main problem with Faust was that our teacher told us everything about the story before we even started reading, I mean, I can understand why people like it, but when someone tells you about all of the interesting stuff but you never get to read it because unfortunately it's not the stuff that is well written... the best part was when he said: "Well, there's a sequel, but it sucks, so ignore it"
But I don't like dramas older than 100 years anyway. I hated "Wilhelm Tell", I hated "Emilia Galotti", I hated "Maria Stuart" and I disliked "Faust" and "Götz von Berlichingen", while I liked all the others. The only exception was Shakespeare. But then I like books most people think are an awful bore, like Böll's "Katerina", which started with a body discovered and then tells why exactly she killed the guy.
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Date: 2006-09-23 05:24 pm (UTC)I have to agree. And I'm the geek who's willing to sit down and try to read it. ^_^
It's more, some of the older books--like The Divine Comedy and Oddessey--have cool language and words and structure. Which, I suppose does qualify as an academic interest.
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Date: 2006-09-23 05:27 pm (UTC)Things Fall Apart. ARGH I HATED THAT GODDAMN BOOK.
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Date: 2006-09-23 05:29 pm (UTC)He started out describing the lake they were rowing across, which morphed into something about the crud on the water which became something about the gray of the sky which stopped before it went anywhere further.
I flipped back and started reading The Lady or the Tiger again.
That is the single most beautiful description of Dante I have ever heard in my life.
*dies*
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Date: 2006-09-23 05:32 pm (UTC)You wonder why Melville wasn't ever burned anyway. I mean, they had to have known what all he was intimating in his books.
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Date: 2006-09-23 05:35 pm (UTC)And City of Joy my ass. That was the city of misery, depression, and 'oh god let me die and end this torture now'.
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Date: 2006-09-23 05:37 pm (UTC)Pip = tool. And the moral of his story is not to fall in love from afar with stuck up bitches because then you become their doormats. *nods*
See, now there would have been a fun essay. "Repressed homosexual tension in Meville novels". Pity they never actually let you write those essays.
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Date: 2006-09-23 05:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-23 05:41 pm (UTC)Of course he dies. It's Kafka, the most depressive writer of the 20th century. I read his one of his lighter novels, and the whole time I was just waiting for the guy to die, so much bad luck really hurt. But I really like him, you just have to wait until you're in the mood.
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Date: 2006-09-23 05:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-23 05:44 pm (UTC)The book I loathed with the passion of a thousand suns? Heart of Darkness. It had such a cool, kickass title and yet was just...-_- I kept waiting for something exciting to happen and it never did. All I can remember about it to this day was that it was a bunch of idiots on a boat sailing down a river...
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Date: 2006-09-23 05:46 pm (UTC)Heh. But it's my lousy schooling that has resulted in my obessing over old spookie stories, bitchign incessantly about classics, and writing fluff.
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Date: 2006-09-23 05:46 pm (UTC)*pants*
Okay, righteous literary fury is now over. Man, it feels good to vent over that book. But honestly, have you ever met someone who actually *liked* that book?
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Date: 2006-09-23 05:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-23 05:47 pm (UTC)I seriously think that story could be declared the single most depressing piece of fiction to ever exist. I hated everything about it and could not understand why someone might like it. Everything about that story makes you hate people.
Pip needed a boyfriend.
Yeah, we never get to have any fun in hs. Thank the gods those days are over.
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Date: 2006-09-23 05:48 pm (UTC)Either they're missing some vital gene or we are.
I was heartily glad that, yet again, I missed a book foisted upon you.
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Date: 2006-09-23 05:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-23 05:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-23 05:53 pm (UTC)Man, it feels good to vent over that book. But honestly, have you ever met someone who actually *liked* that book?
Most of the rest of my class claimed to, and I vaguely recall one of the literature nazis at Dickinson telling me it was a wonderful book. Reason #628 I stuck with history and did't try English - I would have been reduced to pulling out my hair or punching them.
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Date: 2006-09-23 05:58 pm (UTC)Not just Italian politics, Italian politics at the beginning of time! Although, I have to admit, for a book about hell, it really was more amusing to me than it should have been. ^_^;;
I barely, barely got through the Oddessey, and most of what I remember about it is taken from a PBS show called "Wishbone" in which a Jack Russell terrier dressed up as Ulysses and shot a bow and arrow. ^_^;;
I totally envy her that ability.
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Date: 2006-09-23 06:01 pm (UTC)Urgh, I just read the first sentence of "Metamorphosis" and, at least to me, there is a certain lack of rhythm.
And then I read "Amerika", his unfinished novel, which is about a boy travelling to America where he stumbles from one bad situation into another, and whenever he finally did something right it just gets worse. So you really need to know what to expect when you read Kafka or it's pure torture.
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Date: 2006-09-23 06:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-23 06:09 pm (UTC)"Hey, would you like raunchy sex?"
"No thanks. I find that a nice game of whist calms the raging beast in my breast just fine."
See, that's what killed me. *grumbles* stupid LJ...
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Date: 2006-09-23 06:11 pm (UTC)It's sad though. I don't think I ever read Frankenstein. I am going to the store right now to rectify that! This is why I love LJ. I am always reading the most interesting posts!
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Date: 2006-09-23 06:15 pm (UTC)That's the one. And don't get me started on *that* book. Why are all feminist books about goddamn fucking idiots?
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Date: 2006-09-23 07:21 pm (UTC)And you reminded me that I really really want to see a CG-animated movie of Animal Farm now that we have such awesome CG technology :P
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Date: 2006-09-24 04:12 am (UTC)Little Women and The Magic Mountain were my hate books. In college I told my prof that I resented that she was making me read Little Women, and explained my hate of the book, and it pretty much got me an automatic 'A.' She told me how annoying it was to watch women fall in love with the book year after year and have them not get that Alcott wrote it as a passive-agressive reponse to her father's pressure for her to write another book to support the family. I like Alcott better after that... still hate the book.
I also hated The Phantom Tollbooth... but that is reaching back rather far.
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Date: 2006-09-24 04:15 am (UTC)That certainly does explain it.
Magic Mountain I didn't read. Little Women I don't like or hate. It's not really my speed. That's an interesting bit of trivia I'd never heard before.
Never read that one either.
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Date: 2006-09-24 04:01 pm (UTC)But really, my teachers were great. As one asked, while we were studying Their Eyes Were Watching God:
"So why did Janie stay with Tea Cake, aside from the hot sex?"