the_gandy_man's reviews
94 reviews

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

3.5

 I enjoyed this book. The plot's pretty good and the message and philosophy and all that is good. I don't really have any more advanced positive thoughts, although my overall opinion is positive. Anyway here are all my negatives:
I would have liked it more if it got more into

Dorian's transformation. At the beginning, he isn't especially good. He's not a bad dude but he doesn't save any cats or anything. And then after Sibyl dies he just starts being a bad guy. It doesn't feel like a natural transformation, it just feels like "oh I don't really know much about this Dorian guy" and then he's a dick and I'm like "guess he's a dick". It doesn't really feel as caused by the painting or Lord Henry as much as the book wants.
Speaking of Lord Henry, he is unbearable. I understand that he's meant to be unbearable, but way too much of the book is Lord Henry babbling on about his annoying philosophies and saying shit like "Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul" and "All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime". More generally, I think too much of the book consists of characters talking about stuff I don't care about. I didn't really like any of the characters, which I think is on purpose but it still makes the book less enjoyable to read.

Watership Down: 50th Anniversary Edition by Richard Adams

3.75

 Great book. Love the rabbits. Beautiful story. Really makes you feel like rabbit. 

Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley

3.25

 Overall, I enjoyed this book. I liked what it has to say about prejudice, and the plot is interesting enough. It does have some problems which kept me from loving it. The framing device at the beginning takes way too long to set up. Too much of the book feels unimportant; we go on these lengthy explanations regarding things about which I don't care. At the same time, the book is missing things I would like to see. I wish it talked more about the implications of creating life. Frankenstein

creates life and then because it's ugly (because he made it ugly), he treats all of his research as evil and doesn't want anyone else to repeat what he has done. Like dude just don't make it ugly if you don't want it to be ugly. Let's focus on the massive scientific breakthrough that you just had, not to mention the fact that his creation is not only alive, but highly intelligent.

My expectation going into this book was that we would see Frankenstein do monstrous things due to his prejudice against ugly monsters, while the ugly monster is not so monstrous after all. Instead,

I found that Frankenstein was not really that bad of a guy. He fucked up making Frankenstein and then just letting him go, but that's an honest mistake. The act of creating life from nothing is not inherently evil. He is prejudiced toward his monster, and that's certainly immoral, but that's true of every person that meets the monster. For that reason, I feel like the critique is on the prejudices of society rather than of Frankenstein. When the two finally meet and the monster tells his story, I expect that this is when we'll see that Frankenstein is just a guy that's been unfairly rejected by society, but instead he tells of how he kills a kid because of the way people have treated him. You can't do that my guy. Frankenstein and I were on your side until you killed the kid. And then he goes and kills a bunch more people. He's a bad dude. I was expecting a sort of reversal of expectations between Frankenstein and his monster, but instead I found that Frankenstein is not really a bad dude although he made a number of bad choices, and his monster is a sympathetic villain who did some real bad stuff, but we understand how he was driven to that place of irrational violence.

I also felt like I had to do a good bit of suspending my disbelief, to the point that it bothered me. It seemed odd to me that

the monster can easily hide himself while spying on people and not get noticed. He can also travel incredibly well. He finds Geneva just by walking south west (or whatever direction it was) with only the sun to guide him (it also said he traveled by night and rested during the day so there's some dissonance there). And he's able to follow Frankenstein to Britain without being noticed, which would require hiding on a boat. Also Frankenstein sometimes seemed incredibly stupid. The only instance of this I can remember is toward the end when he left his wife alone on his wedding night when his monster specifically said he would see him on his wedding night and had already established a pattern of killing Frankenstein's loved ones. I can't see how in that moment he would be thinking about anything other than protecting Elizabeth.

Overall, while I liked the book, it isn't as good as I hoped it would be. I liked its message, and I appreciate its significance in the sci-fi genre; however, there's a lot of filler between the interesting parts, and I don't find

Frankenstein's monster's actions as justified as I feel the book wants me to.

Death Masks by Jim Butcher

3.25

My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry by Fredrik Backman

4.5

Backman is 3 for 3 at making me cry.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

1.25

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

3.25

Dracula by Bram Stoker

3.25

Misery by Stephen King

4.25

The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien

3.75