This truly is a classic tale of social insight, a story of one seeking acceptance and desiring companionship but being rejected and branded a monster. The thing that I liked most about this book is the fact that it’s divided into two accounts, designed to view both sides of the story. The first part of the book ‘Frankenstein’ tells the story of the life of Victor Frankenstein, the creation of Monster Frankenstein and the death of his younger brother William. A servant ‘Justine’ has been put on trial for this murder, but Victor knows the identity of the true killer. Monster Frankenstein and Victor finally meet up and despite his desire to kill his creation, Victor is forced to listen to the monster’s story, after being threatened.
‘The Modern Prometheus’ tells the story of the Monster Frankenstein, confused and unsure from the very first day of life, found himself hiding in the woods watching people and learning how to find food, create a fire and how to differentiate between the feelings of happiness and sadness. Watching a family in poverty taught Monster Frankenstein many things and he started chopping wood and shoveling snow for the family while they slept. His loneliness finally drove him to show himself to this family who ended up running away in fear. With a mixture of loneliness and anger, he seeks out his creator, finding his way to William where he decides to kidnap him for companionship and ends up accidentally strangling him.
This is where the two stories meet and monster Frankenstein pleads with Victor saying he’s ‘a good creature turned bad by unforgiving humans who scoffed at friendship’. The monster pleads with Victor to make him a companion which he would take and never be heard from again. Victor reluctantly agrees but found it harder and harder to do, even though his family was in danger. Victor began to realize the female companion could wreck much havoc by giving birth to more monsters and refusing to be with the monster as a mate altogether.
Monster Frankenstein swears revenge and goes about killing everyone close to Victor in attempt to show Victor what it feels like to be alone. As Frankenstein dies, the monster appears in his room and begs his dead body for forgiveness.
In the end the story has no true villain or hero. Monster Frankenstein and Victor Frankenstein were both portrayed as hero and villain. The story also leaves you wondering on how you treat others, do our actions end up turning people into a ‘monsters’? Overall this was a brilliant story, although the language was at times hard to understand, it is still worth the read.
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On the Road is a novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, written in April 1951, and published by Viking Press in 1957. It is a largely autobiographical work that was based on the spontaneous road trips of Kerouac and his friends across mid-century America.It is often considered a defining work of the postwar Beat Generation that was inspired by jazz, poetry, and drug experiences. While many of the names and details of Kerouac’s experiences are changed for the novel, hundreds of references in On the Road have real-world counterparts.
Kerouac typed the manuscript on what he called “the scroll”:[3] a continuous, one hundred and twenty-foot scroll of tracing paper sheets that he cut to size and taped together. The roll was typed single-spaced, without margins or paragraph breaks.”The scroll” still exists — it was bought in 2001, by Jim Irsay (Indianapolis Colts football team owner), for $2.4 million, and is available for public viewing. The scroll was displayed in sections at Indiana University’s Lilly Library in mid-2003, and in January 2004, the roll started a thirteen-stop, four-year national tour of museums and libraries, starting at the Orange County History Center in Orlando, Florida. From January through March 2006, it was at the San Francisco Public Library with the first 30 feet (9 m) unrolled. It spent three months at the New York Public Library in 2007, and in the spring of 2008 visited the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The scroll traveled next to Columbia College Chicago in the autumn of 2008, then was displayed at the Birmingham University in England, before being moved once more to University College, Dublin,Ireland and then to NUI Maynooth before returning to the US in March 2009.
The legend of how Kerouac wrote On The Road excludes the tedious organization and preparation preceding the creative explosion. Kerouac carried small notebooks, in which much of the text was written as the eventful seven-year span of road trips unfurled.Besides the differences in formatting, the original scroll manuscript contained real names and was longer than the published novel. Kerouac deleted sections (including some sexual depictions deemed pornographic in 1957) and added smaller literary passages.
On The Road, the most famous of Jack Kerouac’s works, is not only the soul of the Beat movement and literature, but one of the most important novels of the century. His loosely structured, autobiographical works reflect a peripatetic life, with warm but stormy relationships and a deep social disillusionment assuaged by drugs, alcohol, mysticism, and biting humor.
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The slippery year witten by Melanie Gideon is to be published next week by Alfred A. Knopf.With self-effacing humor, Ms. Gideon chronicles the mundanity and small epiphanies of everyday life: taking a trip to Trader Joe’s on her 44th birthday, waiting in the car-pool line at her 9-year-old son’s school and spending thousands of dollars to buy a mattress that both she and her husband of nearly two decades can tolerate. “It’s really a book about nothing or everything. What I discovered is that writing about nothing, I was writing about everything.”said Gideon.
With a 25,000-copy first print run, Knopf’s ambitions are modest. Like every publisher wishing for a breakout, it is counting on word of mouth to propel the book. Some early readers have already had the impulse to share the memoir with friends and family. “I was reading pieces of that book out loud to my friends and husband because I was dying laughing,” said Karen West, a 43-year-old wife and mother who is director of events at Book Passage, an independent bookstore in Corte Madera, Calif., and San Francisco. Other readers have been turned of by Ms. Gideon’s breezy tone and what they see as self-indulgence. “Things are pretty tough right now,” said Ms. Jennings, founder and president of Rainy Day Books, an independent bookstore near Kansas City, Mo “I started thinking: ‘Really? Your husband is nice. Your son is great. Maybe you’re having a midlife crisis, but I’m not sure I’m really on the page with you.”
Although “The Slippery Year” contains large swaths of snappy dialogue, Ms. Gideon said she never took notes and didn’t rush home after incidents to record them. “The things that I remembered are just what I remembered also I do not want to write a memoir that revealed all her family’s warts,just some meoir,not all.”
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