#and it feels like such a love letter to not just frankenstein but mary shelley herself

[phaedraismyusername]

Hi hello have you ever read Frankenstein? Do you have any love for gothic tales about grief, obsession, and love? Have you ever thought you might be a Mary Shelley girly at heart? What about dinosaurs, do you like dinosaurs??

If you even considered a yes to any of these questions then I'm begging you to read Our Hideous Progeny by C E McGill

[aurumacadicus]

October's coming and the theme is horror! Tumblr will vote to help us narrow it down to three books, and then we'll vote for the winner on Discord. If you'd like to join the book club, send me a message, and I'll send you an invitation link! Book summaries are under the cut!

Family Business by Jonathan Sims JUST ANOTHER DEAD-END JOB. DEATH. IT’S A DIRTY BUSINESS. When Diya Burman’s best friend Angie dies, it feels like her own life is falling apart. Wanting a fresh start, she joins Slough & Sons - a family firm that cleans up after the recently deceased. Old love letters. Porcelain dolls. Broken trinkets. Clearing away the remnants of other people’s lives, Diya begins to see things. Horrible things. Things that get harder and harder to write off as merely her grieving imagination. All is not as it seems with the Slough family. Why won’t they speak about their own recent loss? And who is the strange man that keeps turning up at their jobs? If Diya’s not careful, she might just end up getting buried under the family tree…

The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix In horror movies, the final girls are the ones left standing when the credits roll. They made it through the worst night of their lives…but what happens after? Lynnette Tarkington is a real-life final girl who survived a massacre. For more than a decade, she's been meeting with five other final girls and their therapist in a support group for those who survived the unthinkable, working to put their lives back together. Then one woman misses a meeting, and their worst fears are realized—someone knows about the group and is determined to rip their lives apart again, piece by piece. But the thing about final girls is that no matter how bad the odds, how dark the night, how sharp the knife, they will never, ever give up.

Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero In 1977, four teenagers and a dog—Andy (the tomboy), Nate (the nerd), Kerri (the bookworm), Peter (the jock), and Tim (the Weimaraner)—solved the mystery of Sleep Lake. The trail of an amphibian monster terrorizing the quiet town of Blyton Hills leads the gang to spend a night in Deboën Mansion and apprehend a familiar culprit: a bitter old man in a mask. Now, in 1990, the twenty-something former teen detectives are lost souls. Plagued by night terrors and Peter’s tragic death, the three survivors have been running from their demons. When the man they apprehended all those years ago makes parole, Andy tracks him down to confirm what she’s always known—they got the wrong guy. Now she’ll need to get the gang back together and return to Blyton Hills to find out what really happened in 1977, and this time, she’s sure they’re not looking for another man in a mask.

Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle Misha knows that chasing success in Hollywood can be hell. But finally, after years of trying to make it, his big moment is here: an Oscar nomination. And the executives at the studio for his long-running streaming serioes know just the thing to kick his career to the next level: kill off the gay characters, “for the algorithm,” in the upcoming season finale. Misha refuses, but he soon realizes that he’s just put a target on his back. And what’s worse, monsters from his horror movie days are stalking him and his friends through the hills above Los Angeles. Haunted by his past, Misha must risk his entire future—before the horrors from the silver screen find a way to bury him for good.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Stepping far afield from his medical studies, Victor Frankenstein brings to life a human form he has fashioned from scavenged body parts. Horrified by his achievement, he turns his back on his creation, only to learn the danger of such neglect. Written when Mary Shelley was only 20 years old, Frankenstein has been hailed as both a landmark of Gothic horror fiction and the first modern science fiction story.

The Sacrifice Box by Martin Stewart

In the summer of 1982, five friends discover an ancient stone box hidden deep in the woods. They seal inside of it treasured objects from their childhood, and they make a vow: Never come to the box alone. Never open it after dark. Never take back your sacrifice. Four years later, a series of strange and terrifying events begin to unfold: mirrors inexplicably shattering, inanimate beings coming to life, otherworldly crows thirsting for blood. Someone broke the rules of the box, and now everyone has to pay. But how much are they willing to sacrifice?

A Lonely Broadcast by Kel Byron

If you find yourself driving down a winding mountain road near an endless stretch of pines, try tuning in to 104.6 FM: the radio station that shouldn’t exist. The village of Pinehaven has a secret of monstrous proportions. Evelyn McKinnon, a radio host falling on hard times, finds herself utterly unprepared when she learns that the radio station isn’t just for entertainment. It’s a watchtower. She’s stalked by a bird with human eyes. Her co-host won’t stop singing show tunes. And when the fog rolls in, the beasts of Pinehaven Forest begin their brutal hunt. Evelyn and her friends are suddenly face-to-face with something much scarier than ravenous flesh-giants and vengeful spirits: responsibility. ‘A Lonely Broadcast’ is a darkly comedic tale that mixes elements of cosmic horror, gruesome gore, and a touching story about friendship, grief, and finding hope when all seems lost. It’s also the story of an unhinged woman’s personal war with a goddamn bird.

Episode Thirteen by Craig DiLouie

Fade to Black is the newest hit ghost hunting reality TV show. Led by husband and wife team Matt and Claire Kirklin, it delivers weekly hauntings investigated by a dedicated team of ghost hunting experts. Episode Thirteen takes them to every ghost hunter’s holy grail: the Paranormal Research Foundation. This brooding, derelict mansion holds secrets and clues about bizarre experiments that took place there in the 1970s. It’s also famously haunted, and the team hopes their scientific techniques and high tech gear will prove it. But as the house begins to reveal itself to them, proof of an afterlife might not be everything Matt dreamed of. A story told in broken pieces, in tapes, journals, and correspondence, this is the story of Episode Thirteen—and how everything went terribly, horribly wrong.

[agirlandherquill]

Written In Smoke - The Letter Stained In Ink

this week's letter comes to you fresh off the high of finishing reading a book, which i'll be sure to ramble about a little later on so bear with me, a few things have happened this week so here goes!

A Glimpse Through Time - little bits about me and what I’ve been up to this week

the past few days at least have been a lot, a good lot don't get me wrong, but a lot, now here's what I've been up to

A great chunk of my Saturday afternoon comprised of watching F1 (slipping in another fact about me, i'm a big fan), watching the practice, then an F2 sprint and then the F1 Qualifying for the big race - and i'm so freaking happy because my two favourite drivers are in the top 3 positions for tomorrow (you can tell this is written mere minutes after watching the madness) - it's also pretty cool because the track for the UK's race isn't all that far from me, and I'm hoping to grab tickets for next season

While I was watching the incredible chaos of F1, I was also reading, bit more on that below, but the universe must love me because the race finished the same moment that I read the final sentence of my book - talk about timing

I BOOKED MY TRIP TO BATH - I'm so so excited to go and see the Jane Austen Centre and Mary Shelley's House of Frankenstein, issue is I have just over a week to read 4 more Jane Austen books (I've only read persuasion and pride and prejudice, both twice) and Frankenstein (this is my motivation to finally read it haha), but it'll be doable for sure

This absolute genius was 3 hours late (cough, attempting to renew at 2am, cough) returning library books, but the people at the library were so sweet and got rid of the 15p charge and renewed them for me instead - first, and hopefully only time I'm late with library books fingers crossed

Books - This week's been a bit more productive writing-wise, so I only had time to read one book this week, and I finished it today (saturday, incase I take too long to write the rest of this week's entry and send it off tomorrow instead, and let's be honest, it's likely) - You, by Caroline Kepnes, and I've seen the show many, many times, and the book was just as addictive, I'm thinking of reading the rest but that might be a plan for the future since my bookshelves and kindle library are begging me to read the books i own and have yet to read rather than buying more - I did however grab a copy of P.S I Love You in a charity shop and I can't believe it, it literally looks NEW, so I'm going to look forward to reading and watching the movie at some point - I'm also halfway through Love, Theoretically and I am OBSESSED, that and Love Hypothesis were the only books I was planning on reading by the author but now I'm not so sure, they're so GOOD

Shows/Movies - My. Lady. Jane. SPEECHLESS (as of writing this I'm only on episode 5, but I'm hoping to finish it this weekend) and I can't wait to devour the book when the tie-in edition comes out (this is one I NEED in paperback, sorry bookshelves), I also watched Empire Strikes Back this week and can I just say I'm more of a Leia and Han fan than I expected to be - they're so good

Music - us. by Gracie Abrams (this is one of very few of her songs that I know but it is so good to write with, on loop, or it was for the scene I was writing, but that's just what it's like being a writer I suppose, music changes with each scene and some songs fit better than most), Chlorine by TOP - my friends introduced me to them and this is probably my favourite song of theirs, and that's it for this little segment they're the two main songs I can think of

oh and I can include a slightly major adulting achievement - I voted for the first time this week, it was a strange, strange feeling but it happened - I'm not big on politics, not at all, so I won't say too much about it but the thought of crossing a box to decide a country's future is really funny to me, I could not tell you why, but it makes me laugh

Spills From The Ink-Pot - writing, writing, and more writing

this is England, it may be July but the skies sure do know how to pour - which means more time indoors for me writing (I do love writing outside, when it's not too cold, but the rain's brought a little bit of an anti-summer chill, shocker, so this week's been more of an indoors-y one for me)

The current draft of Ruin's Reprisal took a bit of a hammering, as did my keyboard - in the last 3 days alone I've written 6,000 (ish) words, which is a lot for me recently, and it's only going to be more still throughout the rest of this weekend - people ask me why I have a keyboard cover on my laptop, this is why, I hate the thought of wearing down the keys and leaving fingerprints on my screen when I shut my laptop- and with a keyboard cover none of that happens, and my keyboard survives just a little longer (pray for the poor thing, I know I am) - at the time of almost publishing this letter I'm now sitting at 12,000 words written by the end of the weekend (whoops)

Current Word Count is sitting at 212,525, but that's with me having edited up to halfway through Part Two, it's by no means a set number given the amount of chapters I still have to go through, but it's progress (and i love progress)

I'm thinking of making a checklist in these letters to encourage myself to do more writing things in the next week, so here's next week's goals:

Come up with Part Titles - I have Chapter ones, why not for Parts too?

I want to finish Part Two by next week - that's 5 chapters away, possibly doable?

Slightly bigger goal than just next week - I want to write a short story, or a story, maybe not so short, but I want to write start to finish over the summer (maybe it'll be a novella?), it's a challenge I'm setting for myself alongside writing Ruin's Reprisal, and it starts with the little snippet I released earlier this week - writing on a clueless whim becomes an actual, surprisingly good thing, who knew?

I have plenty to show you this time around dear reader, so here's a few snippets for you to sink your teeth into:

She grabbed his hand and pressed it over her bleeding thigh. “Do it. Heal me.” Fenley frowned. “Edeva-” “There’s no time. They’ll find us. I need you to do it.” His brows furrowed, he watched her carefully. “You’ll reject it, won’t you?” He’s figured it out, or he thinks he has. Either way, it doesn’t matter. “This Exilza will survive.” Fenley’s jaw tightened. “I’ll hurt you.” His eyes swept up from her leg to her face. She caught his stare, and she held it. “Then hurt me. I know you’ll make it right.” “…But I can’t.” She watched his throat bob up and down. He’s not willing to hurt me more before he heals me. Her fingers twitched by her sides. It’s going to take drastic measures to make him do it.  She reached up and slung her arm over his shoulders, drawing him in close, Fenley grunted in shock, she used his distraction to grab one of the knives from his coat, he jerked back, his mouth hanging open as she buried the blade in her thigh, close to her wound, and buried her face in his chest to muffle a cry of pain. She breathed deeply and braced herself to rip out his knife. She pressed it into his hands.  “Until I bleed out, my life is yours. Decide.”

This was not hunting, this was not defence, this was murder through and through.  Edeva had taken a life, and now the epithet hanging over her name was true. I am a murderer. Vanquisher. Slaughterer. Monster. She sank to her knees, clutching her head, as the names began to swirl, over and over until they blurred, becoming a perpetual scream in her mind, she could think, still she could not breathe, she could not move. The ground shook, the Oksa were coming for her. She did not look, she did not lift her chin from her chest, she remained still on her knees, succumbing to her fate, her punishment for what she had done. I deserve it. I took a life of theirs and they’ll take this life of mine. The darkness crept in, it took over her, numbing the world until all she could see was the dark, shrouding her like a cloak. Her heart stuttered in her chest. This was not death, this was Shael. “Edeva.” Fenley’s whisper forced her to lift her head. He was on his knees too, one hand on her shoulder. “What are you doing?” “Accepting.” She hadn’t the strength to say more, or the strength to look him in the eye, but he stopped her, he made her, his fingers grasped the hair at the nape of her neck and pulled back sharply enough to force her to meet his gaze. “There is nothing to accept and I will not see you give up, I will not see you submit, not to them. I will not stand around watch your neck break - I won’t,” His jaw clenched. “I won’t, and you won’t either.” The hand on her shoulder pushed roughly and she fell, she fell from the ethereal cloak of Shael and back to the world, back to the fighting. Where Oksa had been there were now smoking remains, such smoke wasn’t normal, and she realised it wasn’t. It was shadow. Whatever Fenley had done she was glad she hadn’t seen it, but he had done it to help her, to save her, to help her save herself - for just a little longer.  Something glinted to her right, it was her sword, sticking out of the dirt. Fenley. He wants me to fight. He wanted her to do the impossible. “I can’t.” She closed her eyes, her fingers curling in on themselves as her hand hung limply by her side. Vitaires do not fall. We stand. We stay standing.  Her Mama’s words had never been so loud in her mind. They were true, they were everything she needed, much like Fenley’s push. I am Edeva Vitarie and I will stand. She took her first breath, then another, I. Will. Stand.

and this next snippet comes from the short story i'm writing (alas yet to be given a title): “It isn’t very often someone gets away with saying no to me.” She startled at his voice. She turned to see him squatting atop a large bin, crammed against a wall, overflowing with rubbish, none of it seemed to bother him as he prowled over its lid and crept down to her level. Her fingers stilled against her laces. “Have I?��� “Not quite.” “I should warn you I’m expected somewhere.” “This won’t take long, I came only to give you this.” She flinched at an envelope hitting her lap, she hadn’t felt him move, let alone seen it.  “If I open it, will it kill me?” “That envelope contains ink and paper, nothing more.” “Nothing less, either.” She mused, slipping the envelope into her coat. “Your stationery is what most would die for.” “Really? I thought I was using the cheaper stuff.” “Rich, are we?”  His laugh almost tempted one of hers. “Not quite. Save your questions for another night, I trust we’ll have one.” He sounds more self assured than the corporate suits that rule the city, is such a thing possible? She stood, laces tied, envelope secure, and hugged herself. The chill of the night had never been so clear to her as it was now.  “If I tell you no, again, will you seek me out?” “You sought me first, I only thought to return the favour.” Is that… A touch of defence? How interesting.  “Very well, I-” “I thought I’d lost you for a minute there, everything all right?” The Assistant’s voice cut through the alley, she turned around, putting on a reassuring smile. “I needed to tie my laces that’s all.” She took a few steps toward him, only glancing back as they went to turn back onto the street. The alley was empty, he was gone.  His letter seemed to weigh more in her pocket before, she placed a hand over it to steady it, and herself. My refusal paid off, he’s more interested than ever before. The more interest, the more willing he is to tell his story. He wanted another night, she sought out plenty more - and she would have them. She had him hooked, and she knew it. 

good grief this week's one is LATE (apologies dear reader, these past few days have been busy ones) but here you go! this week's letter is all typed up, compiled and heading your way!

~ A Girl and Her Quill

Tag List! (if you want to be notified when a WIS post comes out, interact with this post :) )

@lead-to-code @catwingsathena @nothoughtsjustmhaandotherthings @thestorywitch @lunaeuphternal

@theaistired @frostedlemonwriter

[burningvelvet]

Excerpt of a letter from Claire Clairmont to Lord Byron discussing her step-sister Mary Shelley’s new novel, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, 12 January 1818:

“I have Faults. I am timid from vanity; my temper is inconstant & volage. I want dignity. I do not like our Mary sail my steady course like a ship under a gentle & favorable wind. But at thirty I shall be better and every year I hope to gain in value. What news shall I tell you? Mary has just published her first work a novel called Frankenstein or, the Modern Prometheus. It is a most wonderful performance full of genius & the fiction is of so continued and extraordinary a kind as no one would imagine could have been written by so young a person. I am delighted & whatever private feelings of envy I may have at not being able to do so well myself yet all yields when I consider that she is a woman & will prove in time an ornament to us & an argument in our favour. How I delight in a lovely woman of strong & cultivated intellect. How I delight to hear all the intricacies of mind & argument hanging on her lips! If she were my mortal enemy, if she had even injured my darling I would serve her with fidelity and fervently advocate her as doing good to the whole. When I read of Epicharis the slave in Tacitus & of Hypatia of Alexandria in Gibbon, I shriek with joy & cry Vitoria! Vitoria! I cannot bear that women should be outdone in virtue & knowledge by men.”

[saint-starflicker]

Happy Early Halloween, Chat!

By chat I mean @leiflitter (I know you're in output mode! You go, Leif's output mode; just courtesy-tagging 😁) @nbymop @rwoh @spacecasehobbit—and @wolfiso who might still be seeking out ghost stories.

I mentioned wanting to start a book club on the Fable app, and while I'm still discovering some stumbling blocks (app is sensitive to dropped connections so I often have to re-type and post twice after refreshing; the Book Quotes feature doesn't go beyond maybe 350 keystrokes; I never loved star ratings but the emoji rating is too limited and ambiguous too; only 10 tags allowed across so many different rubrics; filling out the Book Review form feels like being a research subject of a target demographic focus group, the Book Club thread-post format I think is less conducive to broader discussions about the books such as racism and disability representation and/or queer readings across a variety of works in the gothic novel "canon"...and then encouraging one another with writing, which was half my motivation for starting up a reading club in the first place, but there's not much wiggle room for customization...)

uh

maybe Fable's list function is better. Yeah. I'm gonna go with sharing my lists.

...I hope it doesn't force link-clickers to make an account before you get to see these lists, because what's the point of the list settings being Public if it's not going to be public Public?

And I don't put this up to imply that anyone reading must read all of them. This is more like, the book club could've been a wine cellar—so I appreciate recommendations because what I do have is still aggressively Anglo.

[screenshot of tweet by @MumblinDeafRo that says: "I said this before, but I try not to think of it as a TBR pile but more like a wine cellar. You try & time the right combination of mood, energy & interest, so that you pick a book when you have the best chance of getting along with it. That's what the writer prefers too." ]

Amontillado under Keep Reading cut.

Early Gothic — The Castle of Otranto (more inspired by medieval chivalric romances and I think the author even tried to pass it off as one; but in all my research everyone says this was the first gothic novel), The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (I think was still low-key riding Otranto's coattails in addition to taking inspiration from it, not that that's a bad thing), The Castle of Wolfenbach (now we're getting somewhere), The Mysteries of Udolpho (oh Anne Radcliffe we're really in it now, and by it I mean a literary genre that was new in like 1790 CE), Glenarvon (the earliest instance of a "Byronic" character I could find that wasn't literally Lord George Gordon Byron's self-insert), The Monk (of all the gothic novels that stirred up controversy, this one was the most stirred up controversiest), Northanger Abbey (oh Jane Austen we're really in it now), Fantasmagoriana: Geschichten der Toten (translated from German to French by Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès, not really on this list to read but rather to say oh George Gordon Byron we're really in it now), The Vampyre (the second instance of a "Byronic" character that I've heard about) and Frankenstein.

I elected to leave out a lot that was on Jane Austen's characters' reading lists in Northanger Abbey (Necromancer of the Black Forest, Carl Grosse's Horrid Mysteries, The Italian, The Mysterious Warning, Clermont, The Midnight Bell, and Orphan of the Rhine) because Northanger Abbey was already there, and to include some nonfiction such as Richard Hurd's "Letters on Chivalry and Romance" that was Hurd's observations on that genre's development, as well as Idée sur les Romans by Worst Human Being of the Century award-winner Marquis Donatien Alphonse François de Sade.

Midcentury and Victorian/Edwardian era Gothic — I didn't actually know whether to put The Last Man by Mary Shelley in the Early Gothic list or if 1826 can count as "midcentury". As it stands, this list begins with A Priest in 1839 by Jules Verne (written in the mid/late 1840s but not published until...1992? and unfinished), Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo, assorted novels by the Brontë sisters, The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Carmilla, Dracula, Clemence Housman's Werewolf, Frances Hodgson Burnett's sort of cozy gothic kid lit, The Phantom of the Opera and The Picture of Dorian Gray.

I really wanted to add Moby Dick and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs's Manor to this list but I think "nautical gothic" could practically be its own thing.

[laddersofsweetmisery]

So excited to start the books I've picked out for October. I'm especially eager to read this little beauty. Two chapters in and I'm appreciative of the amount of research and care taken to tell the lesser-known elements of the behind-the-scenes narrative of Mary Shelley's masterpiece, Frankenstein. She's so fascinating. More so, I am always floored by anything new I learn regarding her mother, often regarded as the first feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft. Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein, by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, is a biography of sorts exploring the lives and work of Mary Shelley’s haunted circle of literary contemporaries—with a particular focus on the four poets and friends with her the stormy night she was inspired to write her gothic tale. Also featured in the book are those who influenced her magnum opus, Frankenstein, but were only in the room with her in spirit.

Poets and friends from that stormy night:

Lord Byron was that famous English Poet described in the book as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” He’s attractive, intimidating, and has a thing for scaring his guests. After frightening his guests with a reading of Fantasmagoriana, a collection of German horror stories, during a stormy night, he proposed a contest where they all take a shot at writing a ghost story of their own.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, or “Mad Shelley,” was fascinated by the occult and married to our equally fascinating Mary Shelley. He wasn’t as popular for his work during his life, likely because it was cut short when he drowned at 29, but his work gained notoriety after his death. He is considered one of the major English Romantic poets.

Dr. John Polidori is credited for the first and most influential novel about a human vampire: The Vampyre. His haunted figure is likely inspired by Byron himself. The two didn’t really get along. The Vampyre was also written as part of the ghost story contest proposed by Lord Byron.

Claire Clairmont was the mother of Lord Byron’s illegitimate child and Shelley’s stepsister.  

Before we make our way into Mary Shelley’s circle, we are introduced to her immutable parents William Godwin and his wife, who I’m casually obsessed with, Mary Wollstonecraft. No joke, their love story will bring you to literal tears, my god. I felt genuinely sick reading about her death and how those who very clearly despised her feminist views took her death as an example of the weakness of her sex. I hope she haunted those fuckers to madness.

Wanna read with me this October? I'll be reading the following books over this month, feel free to pick them up, too! This year, the classics are calling my name 🎃🕯 Since starting Monsters, I'm really craving more so I’ll be reading and rereading works that relate to it in some way :)

Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein, by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler (We’re starting here, obviously.)

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley (We just have to!!!) Available on Kindle Unlimited

An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, by William Godwin (We just have to read from the parents who raised our beloved Mary Shelley.)

The Wrongs of Woman, or, Maria, by Mary Wollstonecraft (Again, we have to! Plus, it’s one of my favorites. I need to share it with everyone who crosses my path.)

Fantasmagoriana, “Tales of the Dead” (Why not read what inspired that stormy night writing contest?) Available on Kindle Unlimited

Lord Byron: Selected Letters and Journals, edited by Leslie Marchand (I wanna know more about this fella. He is also mentioned in The Wager. This one might be a little hard to find, but I’ll post what I can.)

The Vampyre, by Dr. John Polidori (Let’s end our October reading about a lil vamp and finding the comparisons to Byron.) Available on Kindle Unlimited

I'll be posting my thoughts and pages that stick out to me at the end of each day <3

[spindlesaurus-rex]

I don’t know how much time the average person spends thinking about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein but I just had a new thought about it.

Like, obviously, we all know about her father being a Difficult Dad and sending her that letter after her three year old child died that asked why she couldn’t snap out of it and see the rest of the world, and thus it does make the reading of the creature as an allegory for the feelings of rejection we often feel as children when our parents cannot accept who we truly are pretty compelling.

But I’ve also been thinking about the way Victor says he had selected the features to be beautiful but then when animated the creature repels him. Like, it’s about romantic love’s failures too, isn’t it? We could read the creature as the expression of the feeling of when our inner self animates us and changes something about us that someone liked into something difficult.

God? I love Frankenstein.

[emotionally-estarriol]

About a year and some change ago, I decided to buy the first three Artemis Fowl books. I don't exactly remember why I wanted to read them. I had never heard anything about them when I was a kid, seeing as I only read graphic novels and historical fiction, but while wondering around Books-A-Million, I saw them, and after some out-loud debating with myself, my mom chimed in and said: "You should get them, I'm happy you're reading again."

The books just kinda sat around for a while until the day I started A Wizard of Earthsea because I also had started Artemis Fowl that same day. I had an audition later in the day, and I wanted to read something easy and fun to shake my nerves, but I ended up only reading a chapter and then forgot about it, trying to finish Earthsea.

Now, don't get me wrong, Earthsea is a phenomenal book that I now love deeply, but at the time, I was struggling to read it. So after a week of trying to brute force my way through, I decided to tell my friend (Who wanted me to read it) that I was taking a break from the book to read something else and while trying to figure out what book I was gonna read I remembered Artemis Fowl. I saw it on my bookshelf and thought, "Oh yeah, I started that, sure why not? It's middle grade. It'll be quick and easy." I then proceeded to take a month to read the first book.

A month, I know!!! Why did it take me so long? Was I not enjoying it? Did I at least pick Earthsea back up? Well, to answer that last one, the answer is no. In the entire month it took me to read Artemis Fowl, I didn't read any other books, much to the dismay of my friend, who just sat with the knowledge that I was literally 4 pages from THE massive turning point in Earthsea, but anyway, that still doesn't answer the first two questions. The simple answer to the first question is things like school, work, and rehearsal and the fact that I'm just a slow reader. The simple answer to the second was yes, 100% absolutely, but there's more to it than just those surface-level answers.

The answer to those questions is why I'm writing this in the first place, and it all starts with what my mom said to me when I first bought the books in the first place: "You should get them, I'm happy you're reading again." Cuz you see, when I was a kid, I was a reading MACHINE; from the ages of 3 to 11, I always had a book in my hand despite the fact that reading was always kinda hard because the words and letters jumped around on the page (They still do that, I'm in the process of seeing if I have dyslexia. I think I do), but I still read with passion and fervor. Reading was my first taste of escapism, full-on "transported-to-another-world" kind of escapism, and I loved it. It manifested as this warm feeling in my chest and a hazy filter on the world around me. When I got so overwhelmed by the world around me and even my own mind, the escapism from books was there to calm me down and put me at ease.

And then, one day, I stopped.

I can't tell you why I randomly stopped reading one day; I can give you some guesses, but I can't give you a concrete answer. But I stopped, and soon I grew sour towards reading, and I mean sour. Reading became "nerd shit" to me, and I held this weird, arrogant achievement of how long it had been since I stepped foot in my school's library, and over time I slowly forgot the comfort reading used to provide me.

Now, in a more cliche but sweet story, I would say Artemis Fowl was the book that got me back into reading and made me fall back in love with it, but that's not this story because the book that got me into it was none other than Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Trust me, I was not expecting it either! But something about that book in my junior year of high school fucking rerouted my brain and sent me back to the library with a new lease on literature. But then why am I talking about Artemis Fowl? Well, let me answer those two remaining questions. I wasn't just enjoying Artemis Fowl; I was savoring it, and that's why it took me a full month to finish it.

When I decided to go back to Artemis Fowl, I often read it at night before bed (On the nights that I wasn't exhausted from a four-hour rehearsal) with a little battery-powered lantern and my cat Finny next to me. The setup was very similar to when I would read as a kid with my Ikea nightlights and my cat Smokey. And the more I read, the more I found myself saying, "This is exactly what I wanted to read as a kid!" I also was saying, "I'd be insufferable if I read these as a kid!" because Artemis was my peak idea of cool so I would've absolutely, without a doubt, adopted him into my personality, but who knows.

I didn't consciously realize it then, but the further I got into the book, the more that warm feeling in my chest returned and the stronger the hazy filter became. When I cracked this book open, I fell into its world, and it caught me in its cool, badass, loving arms, and it happened every time I went to read it. I laughed, I gasped, I cried, I had such strong feelings about it that I couldn't put it into words. It was like I didn't have the words to describe what I was feeling, much like when I was a kid.

I started Artemis Fowl on October 29th, 2022, and I finished it on November 29th, 2022. It was a full and true month in the middle of my very hectic senior year and it was probably one of the best because,

Artemis Fowl handed me a piece of my childhood back.

And it wasn't the usual kind of nostalgia that you get from finding an old toy or seeing an old cartoon from your childhood because I never interacted with Fowl as a kid! It didn't bring me to the past; it brought the past to me. And in a way that I so desperately needed as adulthood stared me down. And though I didn't know it then, I know it now.

I read Arctic Incident a couple of months later, and the feeling returned, and now, as I write this, I'm reading Eternity Code. This whole post came about because I had the idea to live-blog my experience with Eternity Code (because I read the back and WIGGED OUT), but after thinking about it for a bit, I decided against it and wrote this instead. Live blogging felt a little too personal, even though I just dumped out my fucking emotional attachment to these books for the entire internet to see. Still, it felt too personal because stopping to write felt like it would break my warm cocoon of haze, and I don't wanna lose that, not again.

I may talk about Eternity Code once I finish it, I may not (I probably won't), but I just wanted to shout into the void about what this book has done for me.

I don't believe your inner child ever goes away. Sometimes, they just get lost and need help getting back home. It may take a while, they may keep getting lost, hell, they may not even want to come home, but when they do finally come home, something just clicks into place and relief just washes over you.

If I ever meet Eoin Colfer, I'm probably gonna say something silly like, "Nah, man, I read these books when I was 17, I didn't even know they existed as a kid", but at some point, I have to thank him for these books.

Artemis Fowl didn't change me; it brought me home.

[floweringgodhead]

Caspar David Friedrich, "Seashore by Moonlight"

"I am, I thought, a tragedy; a character that he comes to see act: now and then he gives me my cue that I may make a speech more to his purpose: perhaps he is already planning a poem in which I am to figure. I am a farce and play to him, but to me this is all dreary reality: he takes all the profit and I bear all the burth."

-- Mary Shelley, Matilda

Percy, cmon bro cmon your kids are dead, you haven't reared one, and your wife's feeling like this, this?

A couple years ago when I read Charlotte Gordon's Romantic Outlaws (I think there are accuracy issues with the book but I still really enjoyed reading it) at the point where after Percy's death Mary struggles to sift through his journals, his papers, his scribbles, his drawings, so she can produce a critical edition of his work; Gordon mentions how this was likely the first time Mary read the poems Percy wrote following the deaths of their children (but particularly after William's death, his favorite and thus the more pained ones); some of them were more specific to the children but many were about the larger scale of the experience of mourning and underscored Mary's emotional withdrawal from him. The indication is that Mary must have felt not only anguished at discovering the thoughts their relationship was too strained for her husband to have voiced to her but that the poems made her regretful (Richard Holmes made similar claims in The Pursuit during one of his strange, anti-Mary interpretations of Shelley's life: "oh that thinking woman's going to rue being mean to poor Percy so bad") for how she treated him, andddd this quote has got me thinking about that.

I have two thoughts: (1 even if scholars enjoy analyzing her work contextually with her life -- to the same utmost degree they study other romantic writers this way -- Mary herself viewed biographical interpretation of her work as futile, that such readings were incompatible with her purposes. In a letter she says, "I am a great enemy to the prevailing custom of dragging private life before the world." Given that, it's perfectly reasonable, and respectable, to read this as more a beautiful example of the aesthetics of grief and suffering than a personal revelation, and she was one of the greatest stylists of our time so there's no arguing that that would've somehow been beyond her power. But that doesn't stop us from speculating and (2, I'm wondering if maybe this passage could reveal another possibility of Mary's reaction to the poems than what Gordon offers. It had to have hurt. She lost almost everyone she loved at a heartbreakingly young age and would mourn Percy for the rest of her life, but I wonder if she might not have felt so much shock (which is what many suggest) as her expectations met. If we do read this quote biographically, it shows that she knows how Percy worked, how he processed his emotions -- she wouldn't have been surprised to discover then that he's using his personal experience, and hers, to write poetry. I.e., she's grieving so that means that "perhaps he is already planning a poem in which I am to figure."

But it could also just show that, as an artist, she knows how the mind of one works and the lengths they go to for inspiration -- who knows

This has all mostly been to say that Matilda, like all of her non-Frankenstein works, is painfully underappreciated and everyone should go read it right now

[aneshza]

Frankenstein

Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus was written by Mary Shelley and published in 1818 during Romantic period. But, it also has a connection to the Enlightenment Period because it was published nearly at the end of the Enlightenment which influenced the author's work. It was a gothic novel, a combination of horror and science fiction story. It was about a man telling the story by sending a letter to his sister about the scientist’s life, which was also said to him by the scientist. It was about an intelligent scientist who created a monster out of human body parts because of searching, finding, and experimenting for immortality so that his loved ones could escape death. However, he didn’t think of the possible consequences of his actions. When the monster was created, he didn’t take responsibility as the owner of the creature, he tried to run away from the problems it had made and just kept silent, even though other lives went in vain. In the end, he died and when the monster saw it, he also killed himself.

My favorite character in the novel is the monster. The monster doesn’t have a specific name, but everyone calls him a monster. He was secretly created by a scientist named Victor Frankenstein. When he was made, he was a monster-eating human. Even though he did cruel things, in the end, he wanted to be like humans, with the same respect and treatment but in the end, no one wanted him, everyone still hated him.

I can relate to this character because I also have a side where I want to be accepted by society, not be left out, mingle with others, and be what they are, from their style to how they act. But in the end, I can’t keep up, I can’t be like them, there’s always a gap, a difference, it can’t be that way, they will always make you feel that you do not belong, it feels like they are judging you, stabbing you at the back, into your insecurities in life but not noticing your good deeds, nor your positive side. The monster wants to have a normal, but he can’t achieve it. He even fell in love with a human being, but he can’t be with her that’s why he asked Frankenstein to make a woman like him. However, when Frankenstein is about to finish making the woman, he destroys it because he is afraid that many more accidents or crimes will happen because of them, and they will become more powerful. And that’s when the monster began to hate him that’s why Victor started to go to faraway places to avoid his creation but ended up dying in a boat because of disease. In the end, he killed himself after his creator died because he felt like he didn’t have a purpose, and he regretted his actions and felt guilty about hating Victor. It was such a sad ending that reflects today’s society. It’s hard to be accepted by everyone, especially if you are different. Even if you did everything for them, they would always give back what they think you deserve based on your appearance and judge you based on their perspective. The monster actually had a kind-hearted soul. It only proves that a villain is not born but made.

Frankenstein was more about searching for eternity without thinking about the consequence of one’s action, which reflects the people's behavior during the Enlightenment period and is connected to today’s time. People continue to create, build, and experiment to solve problems or for improvements to be advanced, and high-tech but never consider the impact and effect of their creation on our environment. The Enlightenment period was about celebrating ideas, the highlight of this period was more about technology, inventing everything that comes to the mind of the people, and it is still apparent during this generation. This novel is also related to romanticism as what was illustrated by Mary Shelly, in her made character, the monster, where the feelings and agony of the character were expressed. It is about being completely different in a community, where you were known to be a cruel one, but once you have a desire to change yourself, society will always try to drag you down, not believing, not wanting, but are against you. One of the morals in the novel is to be responsible in every action that you take, no matter what the consequences are, you should never run from it, figure it out, you started it, and you must finish it.

[ritzcrackee]

may tbr post yayy

rereads are marked by a ☆, new reads are marked by a ♡, and new acquisitions are bolded

physical tbr: 15

more letters from a nut - ted l. nancy ♡

fahrenheit 451 - ray bradbury ♡

little (grrl) lost - charles de lint ♡

dracula - bram stoker ♡

dune - frank herbert ♡

dune messiah - frank herbert ♡

frankenstein - mary shelley ♡

juilet takes a breath - gabby rivera ♡

sense and sensibility - jane austen ♡

stories of people and civilization, greek ancient

origins - lindsay powell, j. k. jackson ♡

the silent stars go by - dan abbet ♡

touched by an angel - johnathan morris ♡

the handmaids tale - margaret atwood ✩

the testaments - margaret atwood ♡

aristotle and dante discover the secrets of the

universe - benjamin alire sáenz ✩

digital tbr: 4

pandora's jar: women in the greek myths - natalie haynes ♡

providence girls - morgan dante ♡

cemetery boys - aiden thomas ♡

if you could see the sun - ann liang ♡

read: 11

an education in malice - s. t. gibson - 3.5/5

i have,,, conflicted feelings on this book. it was good, the action was interesting, the characters were complex, the vibes were impeccable, but,,,,, idkkk.... i can't even verbalize it but there was something about this that just made it a slog to get through.

i can't help myself from comparing it to a dowry of blood, which i feel had a much cleaner execution of very similar themes. dracula felt charasmatic, he felt gravitational, he felt like a person you would give up humanity for. de lafontaine felt,,,, like a mean professor. carmilla and laura constantly wax on about how brilliant and intoxicating she is, but i never felt that. s.t. gibson can write an obsessive, imbalanced, interesting relationship! they can write it very well! so i don't understand why this fell flat for me.

overall, i think this book was disjointed. it felt like a collection of vibey scenes and quotes to put on your instagram. (which, to be fair, the quotes are banger. and the vibes are so so vibes.) i liked it, but i don't know how long it'll stay on my shelf.

maneater - emily antoinette - 2.5/5

tbh i don't have much to say abt this 👍 it was an ok book 👍

hot button issue - catrina bell - 2.5/5

i liked seeing more of this world! the couple wasn't really my thing but thats more of a me issue (get it? no? ok) i do wish there was a little more roller derbying but overall this was cool.

wild is the witch - rachel griffin - dnf

cool concept but the writing style was too repetitive for my taste 👍

luxuria - colette rhodes - dnf

i didn't like this book whoopsies. i wanted to actually try fantasy romance instead dismissing the entire genre but ummm. yeah no i don't like fantasy romance. not my thing. paranormal besties please take me back ill never stray again 🙏

garron park - nordika night - 1/5

ok so. well. where do i even start with this book. extremely silly to, at 25 years of age, call someone your enemy. are you five? are you five years old? everyone certainly swears like a five year old. tiny baby writing tip: maybe keep the word fuck to, like, once a paragraph.

additionally, you can create tension without violence sometimes! if your main characters have confessed their undying love to each other, probably they can talk to eachother for four seconds! probably they don't need to punch eachother as much! probably, a change in their actions and words would show the audience how much their relationship has grown.

i also wasn't super into how many times the main characters brothers brought up how sexy they were? kind of a weird move. certainly not something i would choose to say about my own brother, nor my best friends brother! maybe thats just me though who knows

it was genuinely just edgy k-pop wattpad poverty-porn yaoi but? i did read 300 pages in one sitting so? points for that? you get 1 point for that.

rebel girls - elizabeth keenan - 2.5/5

second pro-choice book i've read this month so thats cool! guess we have a theme going. tbh i don't have much to say about this. the characters were interesting, if lacking in depth. the plot was fine, if lacking in depth. the messaging was good, if lacking in depth. i guess this book was overall, lacking in depth. i'm sure my local free little library will appreciate it. 👍

undergrounders - j. e. glass - 2.5/5

this is just the month of the perfectly average books huh? everybody's getting 2.5 stars skdisjdj.

anyways, i wanted to see if my issue with luxuria was actually its genre, or if it was the overwhelming hetero of it all. so i read a queer fantasy romance! with all of the tropes i like! and i still didn't enjoy it :(. i am glad that i tried this, but i can say with absolute certainty now that fantasy romance is not for me.

the main couple was sooooo cutes though and the side characters were sooooo cutes and the worldbuilding was v v v cool! if you like sapphic fantasy romance? absolutely reccomend this book!

the ballad of songbirds and snakes - suzanne collins - 3/5

girl this is why u reread books bcus i used to tell people that this was my favorite book ever. it is not. idk why i thought that.

ANYWAYS this was alright. i liked how easy the themes were to pick up on, the ambiguous ending, and listening to coriolanus justify his weird evil behavior. that was cool. i didn't like um lucy gray. not because she was bad, but because she felt like a non-character yk? i thought she had some pretty cool characterization in the beginning, especially surrounding her being a performer (being a parallel to coriolanus) but then she kind of fell off and just became a stock Trusting Girlfriend. which was meh. i'm excited to watch the movie, snow lands on top or whatever 👍

cultish: the language of fanaticism - amanda montell - 4/5

this was very cool to learn about and easy to digest 👍. not a full 5/5 because it was nonfiction so i wasn't obsessed with it, but definitely more engaging than most other nonfiction books I've read.

fox court - nora sakavic - 1/5

started reading this because i heard that it was like,,, bad but addictive? like full wattpad nonesense but u look up and you've finished the whole series in one sitting yk? it was,,, not that way for me. i thought it was boring, confusing, and the characters were sooo unlikable. ik this has a pretty big fandom on here please don't come for me sowwyy um. yeah

last months goal: finish a reread

WOO HOO i did it this time! gold star for me, best reader in the whole world. this was really easy, because i genuinely couldn't remember a single thing about a ballad of songbirds and snakes, so it felt like i was reading a brand new book. i also said that i wanted to carve away a more sizable chunk of my tbr this month, which i kind of did? i only read 3 physical books, but i got rid of almost an entire shelfs worth because my family was having a yard sale! so yk. vibes.

this months goal: ... finish dune

LOOK LOOOK STOP THROWING TOMATOES AT ME LOOK ok. last time this was a lofty goal filled with folly and big dreams and it was stupid. THIS TIME i literally only have 257 pages left. which is actually so reasonable. if i read 50 pages a night before bed that's only 5 days of reading. i can straight up do this one this time I PROMISE.

[burningvelvet]

so i have some random questions, maybe you could answer, and am curious if any have had any academic papers written up about them, or if you just.. know where to find the information? Bit of a meta question: How much information do we actually have of the gang on their days in Geneva around the time of digging into their ghost stories? Is it just ex. what you've posted before of their journals of the time, or do we have other later recollections akin to Mary's own in her intro of Frankenstein? Just how much remains, and how much can we pull from various sources etc? (research is fun, go off on this on, i love to read it.) The evening before mary's waking dream, do we have any further recollection by the others on their discussions on the principle of life, other than her account? Or even in general by the squad thru their lives, does anyone dig into the technological advancements and scientific theories of their time, or even those of the Enlightenment thinkers? (Newton, Hooke, Boyle, et al.) I assume since it's the Romantics with their general dislike of the prior period it's a no, and also because I'm asking about bloody poets, not academics, but..? Likewise, anything written by the gang on her waking dream and the effects after? (could've sworn I read something about Mary appearing gastly pale?) (I'd love to hear your thoughts and rants and rambles on the following, :D): Or do we have anything written by others outside the gang in reference to her dream after she gave her Intro? Something like.. (I can't articulate this well, pls bear with me; ) Has there been any sort of mysticism, or poetic acknowledgement of Mary's 'waking dream'/'hallucination' being written as something 'supernatural'? Anything written akin to that one parody/horror film you mentioned where everyone basically hallucinates that night lol. like.. Mary's Intro gives such an inherent je ne sais quoi (lol) of.. this entire fragment of history? It reads like a frozen slice of a gothic novel/poem in itself. Very 'based on a true story' but the true story holds more substance than Frankenstein itself. As if Mary herself was in a gothic novel writers could only dream of. Has nobody noted this? Tried to catch it, wax poetic on it? I feel like there's a.. gravitas here but I don't see anyone speak of it? (other than that horror film.)

This will be long!

Re: Geneva 1816 sources: We have letters, journals, records (like receipts), accounts from the other people on the lake, accounts from aristocrats Byron visited at Geneva without the Shelleys presence, and some accounts from Lord Byron's Geneva servants given to inquiring tourists later on. Lake Geneva was an insulated aristocratic vacation town and gossip abounded.

First-person documents: - Polidori’s 1816 journal, his prefaces to The Vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold. - History of a Six Weeks Tour, Mary’s first book, co-written with Shelley; travelogue containing letters and journals from their travels in 1814 and 1816. - Mary Shelley’s other journals and letters. - Mary Shelley's (voluntarily uncredited) contributions to Thomas Moore's biography series on Byron, where the time in Geneva is talked about and where most of the funny stories come from, and a handful of comments in Thomas Moore's diaries/letters regarding Mary's recollections. - Byron’s letters, found here on Peter Cochran's site (he was an editor/scholar & leading Byronist) https://petercochran.wordpress.com/byron-2/byron/

Best books about the summer of 1816: - Byron in Geneva by David Ellis, - The Poet and the Vampyre by Andrew Stott, - The Making of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" by Daisy Hay.

Books on Frankenstein or the tech & science of the time in relation to Mary & other Romantics: way too many to mention! Frankenstein is one of the most written about works of all time, and tech discourse is inherent to Romanticism — there are tons of books & articles written about all topics. Percy studied science with James Lind and was inspired by Erasmus Darwin who Mary refers to in a Frankenstein preface. 

On if others at Diodati recollected specifically about Frankenstein or Mary being pale: Percy wrote a review of Frankenstein as well as the novel's introduction section (he wrote it from Mary's POV), and he mentioned the novel in his letters; Claire discusses it several times in her letters with praise, Byron mentions it once or twice with brief compliments; Polidori mentions it in the preface to Ernestus Berchtold in compliment but with possible jealousy beneath. Your "pale" reference likely refers to how she and Byron said she looked when learning of the news of Percy's missing boat; I made a post about that (https://www.tumblr.com/burningvelvet/710178692214784000/from-conversations-of-lord-byron-with-the-countess?source=share). 

My Interpretation of Mary's "waking dream": This was largely metaphorical. Mary probably did have an inspirational dream (scientists have found evidence: https://m.csmonitor.com/Science/2011/0928/Frankenstein-moon-Astronomers-vindicate-Mary-Shelley-s-account) but at the same time I do think she sensationalized the trip a bit. From the novel The Poet and the Vampyre: "these [visits to Diodati were] not always convivial - Mary describing the 13 August visit in a single word: 'War.'" Mary, like everyone else, mythologized the summer of 1816. The preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein (different from the 1818 original) sensationalizes the origins with a gothic flare because that’s what she knew her fans wanted; she was a widowed single mother in her 30s determined to make a living off her writing, and she enjoyed the immense popularity of Frankenstein, helping to proliferate it through the wildly successful stage adaptation which was spookier and showier than the philosophical novel.

Mary “said the three or four months she passed there were the happiest of her life,” (source: Thomas Moore’s journal, vol. 5, p. 178, via Internet Archive). Before, and especially after this summer of 1816, Mary experienced many traumas which left her with severe depression, and so she romanticized that time, ignoring all of the many ongoing problems surrounding it.

1816 was extraordinary fun for all of them, but it was not paradise. The summer was littered with actual storms as well as emotional storms. In the 1831 preface Mary makes no mention of Claire’s existence, though Claire was the only reason they were even there, since Claire wanted to visit Byron who she was having a horribly drawn out affair with. The two dramatically broke up that summer, made worse by Claire then revealing she was pregnant with his child. There was also a lot of drama with Polidori (writer, and Byron’s doctor) who fought with Byron and Percy, threatening Percy to duel him over a sailing race.

Mary was also in denial about Percy’s many problems. Shelley was mentally and physically ill, perpetually on the run from debtors who had imprisoned him, disowned by his family for being kicked out of Oxford due to atheism, publicly notorious, had a wife and children back in England, and more than likely had an ongoing affair with Claire, causing Byron to briefly wonder at their child’s paternity. Still, Mary was madly in love with Percy from the time she met him until her last moments on Earth when she died staring at his preserved heart which she requested to be buried with. She shared his struggles and spent much of her life defending him, and she's the reason he achieved posthumous fame thanks to her relentlessly promoting, annotating, editing, transcribing, publishing, and republishing his works.

She occasionally does hint at the drama of that time, and how hurt she felt at times, but generally Mary ignored these things, as well as their many other flaws, so that she could remain on good terms with all of them (especially Claire and Byron after their break-up). Despite the drama, she had felt the good times at Lake Geneva were the best times of her life thus far. She was in the most beautiful place in the world, she loved traveling, she felt inspired to write, her baby was healthy and had a good nanny, her own health improved, she spent fun times with her lover who was happily preoccupied with sailing, Claire (who she loved but also found annoying) was preoccupied with Byron, and she found Byron fascinating.

Not even a year after the trip, she was already painfully reminiscing about her good memories: 

“that time is past, and this will also pass, when I may weep to read these words, and again moralise on the flight of time. Dear Lake! I shall ever love thee,”

“We may see [Byron] again, and again enjoy his society; but the time will also arrive when that which is now an anticipation will be only in the memory. Death will at length come, and in the last moment all will be a dream.”

“why is not life a continued moment where hours and days are not counted — but as it is a succession of events happen — the moment of enjoyment lives only in memory and when we die, where are we?”

Frankenstein was started in the summer of 1816 and first published in 1818. Then there was an 1831 edition, the most commonly read today, which is slightly different (slightly less radical for Victorian audiences) and which includes the preface which refers to the “waking dream.” Scholars have noted that Mary’s recollection is partly based on her mythologizing and romanticizing her youth. This is even more obvious considering all of the traumas she had experienced afterward. In her journals (via Project Gutenberg) she often refers to her youth as being like a dream before Percy's death. She was seeing her life through rose-tinted glasses to cope, and possibly experiencing depression-related derealization. 

Condensed timeline of Mary’s traumas to show what I mean about the Frankenstein period being a relatively happier time for her: Her mother died giving birth to her. June 1814: her and her step-sister Claire run away with Shelley. Problems with her father for years after (though they eventually rekindle). Feb 1815: 1st child dies, becomes pregnant a few months later. Jan 1816: has 2nd child who is healthy. Summer 1816: Geneva summer, begins writing Frankenstein; Claire in love with and pregnant by Byron before their relationship dissolves. Oct 1816: Mary’s half-sister Fanny kills herself. Dec 1816: Shelley’s wife kills herself; Mary marries Percy to protect their kids & so he can gain custody of his first 2 kids. Mar 1817: they stay in Marlowe; Mary described this as maybe their happiest residence, and this is where she wrote much of Frankenstein. 1817 misc.: court denies them custody of Shelley's first two kids due to his unorthodoxy; Percy self-exiles from England, they move to Italy, move around continuously, & suffer illness. Sept 1817: 3rd baby is born & dies. Jan 1818: Frankenstein published. June 1819: 2nd child dies while Mary is pregnant with 4th child. Nov 1819: has 4th & only surviving baby (Percy Florence, who lives a long life). 1821: Polidori dies from suspected suicide. April 1822: Claire & Byron’s baby Allegra dies. June 1822: news of Allegra’s death. Mary almost dies from a miscarriage, Percy saves her life. July 1822: Percy dies in a boat accident. Their social circle splits up. Claire moves to Russia. After comforting her, Mary’s closest friend Jane (whose husband died with Percy; the two couples lived together) breaks up their friendship & moves abroad. Mary suffers multiple social conflicts which are largely not her fault, & becomes socially isolated. 1823: Byron & their mutual friend Trelawny join the Greek War. 1824: Byron dies. Mary writes her apocalyptic novel The Last Man as a tribute to her broken social circle & it’s members.

From her journal, Oct 2, 1822: “Father, mother, friend, husband, children—all made, as it were, the team which conducted me here, and now all, except you, my poor boy (and you are necessary to the continuance of my life), all are gone, and I am left to fulfill my task.”

Several times, she wrote that the only reason she didn’t kill herself was because of her son Percy. However, note: Her life did improve after The Last Man. It's a bit of an outdated view that she was just a stereotypical depressed widow forever after. She was a strong and determined woman, and she eventually had a full social circle, friends, married son, daughter-in-law, flirtations, a successful writing career, hobbies, and so on. She found meaning through motherhood, writing, and paying tribute to Percy. However, for all these reasons, she saw the period of Frankenstein and prior to be some of the happiest times of her life and a "calm before the storm" (literally, the storm that killed Percy), which explains all the above.

[notasilentk]

An Open Letter to Guillermo Del Toro With Regards to his Life-Like Statue of Mary Shelley

Or: A Modern Frankenstein

(Image from Guillermo Del Toro’s Twitter post wishing Mary Shelley a happy birthday.)

First off, hi there, Mr. Del Toro—love your work.

Secondly, what the hell, man? That’s—that’s just something you have?! In your home?? A life-size statue of Mary Shelley sitting at a writing desk looking mildly alarmed—as if Lord Byron just said the stupidest shit she ever heard or as if she just had the thought, “Oh you know what would be really fucked up?” and then decided to write it down. (Please excuse my run on sentences, it’s a terminal condition for which I have found no treatment.) I didn’t know you could just have things like that in your home! Granted I live in a small-ish apartment in the valley and so my imagination and vision is somewhat constrained by square footage and also my meager earnings as a currently out of work tv assistant moonlighting as a part-time bookseller. However, I acknowledge this is no excuse. Imagination is not hampered by constraints, but freed by it. She’s a wily fucking octopus problem solving the hell out of her cage and squeezing through the smallest of holes to exert her will and get her prize (delicious fish in other tanks at the aquarium).

Wait, where was I?

Oh yeah. Your Bleak House is magnificent. I’ve scoured over the photos I’ve found online. I must confess in so many ways I still feel like an entry level student to horror. I haven’t even seen all of your movies yet, Mr. Del Toro. I am working on it, though—so please excuse this easily distractible magpie mind of mine. I tend to flit and flop and flip between subjects at the random behest of whatever goblin is in control of my brain that week, day, hour, minute, etc. 

I think Crimson Peak is underrated though. I just wanted you to know—I really liked it. I wasn’t even supposed to see it the night that I saw it first. We were supposed to go to a haunted house attraction, but that didn’t work out and we ended up at the movie theater. I insisted on seeing a horror movie as a consolation prize for being deprived of my haunted house. What luck that it should be your film that was playing on that warm Arizona October night. 

So like. 

What are you gonna do with Mary Shelley when you die? 

Could I have her? Do you ever scooch her over and write at the desk she’s at? Do you talk out story ideas with her ever? I feel like I would, if I had a life size statue of a famous writer in my house. You have a lot of statues and figures and models—I imagine you talk to all of them in the fashion of how people converse with their pets or their plants. Or I could projecting—I don’t know you, even if you’ve shared so much of yourself with all of us.

But when I mean “Can I have Mary Shelley when you’re done with her?” I don’t mean personally—though I wouldn’t be so rude to turn down a personal gift.

I mean—could we have Bleak House? Los Angeles? The cinephiles? The apostles of the strange? You’ve opened it before—would you open it again for fans of horror and science fiction and fantasy to peruse your vast collection? Would you haunt its walls—if you had the chance? Where will you go, when you leave us, Mr. Del Toro? And what will you leave us, your fellow children of the macabre, raised on your ghost stories and tales of terror? You owe us nothing, of course. But we will take it all like vultures at the kill, thus is the way we treat our idols.

I have to confess—I was angry when I read Frankenstein that first time. I didn’t like it. 

Hear me out.

It was Ms. Yip’s sophomore language arts honors class. We had to do a book club, split into various small groups based on the book we chose to read from a curated list. I picked Frankenstein. I had just recently been introduced to Edgar Allen Poe by my creative writing teacher, Mr. Sable, and Frankenstein felt like a natural continuation of that line of instruction. Besides, I had always been interested in the spooky and the creepy and the macabre. Feed a child on a steady diet of Scooby Doo re-runs and tattered Goosebumps books and you are liable to produce a kid as obsessed with Halloween as I was—still am. 

So I picked Frankenstein and then I didn’t read it. I was busy. I had other things to do. I was a teenager and this was homework and I was always a fast reader anyway—“I’ll get it later, it’s fine,” I insisted. But then one day it was Sunday and our book club homework reading was due that Monday and I hadn’t read Frankenstein. Hadn’t cracked the spine, even. Oops. 

There was a little room, a bit of a nook—bit of a crawlspace with carpet and a light—above the stairs in my home. You had to use a ladder to get up into it. It was my library, where I kept all my childhood books and my growing manga collection. It was still kinda too warm to be up there—it didn’t get good air flow and the meager fan that fit up there did few favors against the unrelenting and indomitable Arizona summer that stretched long into what people insisted was “autumn.” Determined to knock this book out, though, I piled into the library and lounged across the pillows and ignored that it was just this side of too stuffy and settled into read a Great Horror Novel.

I had no appreciation for it. I was shocked and dismayed that the monster was neither green nor had little bolts in his neck to hook up to the lightning harnessing machine. At this point in my life I was mostly familiar with Frankenstein from this one movie called Alvin and the Chipmunks meet Frankenstein (I preferred the one where they met the Wolfman—I rewatched that one all the time as a kid) and also Mel Brook’s Young Frankenstein, which I watched on a fancy charter bus during either a school field trip or a Girl Scout’s trip—can’t remember which, but I do remember thinking, “I don’t know if this is technically age appropriate for us, but it rules.”

Also, this was homework and I resented doing homework. The book was nothing like I expected. Its language felt tedious to me, as did the language of all the books I had to read for class back then. Maybe that’s what drew me to poetry back then. All the poets seemed so much easier to understand. Contradictory maybe, but whatever I contain multitudes. Mostly I admit I was just a stupid teenager grabbing at whatever rebellion I safely could and rejecting the classics as stuffy and pretentious and difficult felt both safe and righteous. I was starved for rebellion, you see.

So I barreled through Frankenstein. And I got it. Victor was the monster, not the Creature. Nature vs nurture and all that. With great resentment I read the foundational text of science fiction and a seminal piece in horror as quickly as I could so I could go back to watching episodes of Doctor Who (New Who) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer—completely obtuse to the fact that both of these cheesy, emotional, thrilling, and delightful shows owe everything to Mary. I owed everything to Mary and I was too much of a spoiled child to even pay attention properly and appreciate that. But I finished the damn book.

I came in on Monday and discussed Frankenstein with my fellow students in our small group. It became apparent that not all of us had really read our books and we all kept that secret as much as we could. Ms. Yip didn’t even ask us that many questions about our books. There was no essay. There was no test. And I walked out of fourth period, off to lunch, with that knot of resentment growing in my stomach. I wasted a Sunday for nothing! I read Frankenstein for nothing!

I shelved my Penguin Classics copy with the boring brown cover and moved on with my life.

But Frankenstein stuck with me. It popped up, every now and then in my life. I stuck on allusions to it. I found quotes I recognized referenced on various blogs. I thought about it more and more. It haunted me.

I thought about this one quote in particular, which is not actually from the novel but from the 1994 film (though it certainly sums up what Mary was getting at and is so often misattributed to the novel that you must forgive me for being mistaken when I was saw it repeated online so much): “I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.” I was confused and angry all the time as a teenager. I was also infuriatingly idealistic. If I had been less idealistic, maybe I would have been less angry. Less furious with the world I was growing into and at myself for all my perceived faults and imperfections. I wanted to burn the world to the ground when I was young. I wanted to love the ashes.  

And I thought about Frankenstein more and more, as the months dragged on. Tenth grade turned to eleventh turned to twelfth turned to graduation and college and the world got bigger and bigger and scarier and scarier. All the while, the Creature and Victor lurked at the back of my mind. Mary lurked at the back of mind. I remember being 18 and 19 and thinking “I am as old as Mary was when she wrote that book I didn’t even want to read once I started reading it. I am as old as Mary was when she invented science fiction. What have I done? I haven’t even been cool enough to lose my virginity in a graveyard.” (My mother is, thankfully, still alive so I didn’t have the option of losing my virginity at her tombstone, I would’ve had to settle for a stranger’s grave.) I was a very regular 19-year-old of the American 21st century. It was the mid 2010s. Mostly, I made goofy short films and incomplete attempts at novels. I listened to Taylor Swift’s new pop album (I don’t know if Mary Shelley would have cared for her music) and mourned that My Chemical Romance had broken up (I think Mary Shelley would have liked them). To my great dismay I was lucky enough to be a perfectly ordinary teenager, Mr. Del Toro. I didn’t change the world, like Mary Shelley had. I just lived in it.

Anyway, I came to understand I was Victor and I was the Creature. I am the monster I make of myself. I am an experiment of my own design. We are all cobbling together the most ideal parts we can find in the wild and fitting them into ourselves to be better—whatever better is supposed to mean. We are all struggling to come to grips with the grotesque things in ourselves—out of shame, out of fear, out of guilt. 

We are all begging to be loved.

Once upon a time, I hated Frankenstein. I learned to love it. (I think love is a learned thing sometimes, don’t you? It is at once instinctual and a discipline.) Victor’s fault is often said to be that he could not learn to love unconditionally. He rejected his own Creature out of fear and people died for it. We all side with the monster now, don’t we? In the end the Creature won the PR battle. 

I wonder sometimes, about forgiving Victor for his sins. I wonder sometimes, about condemning the Creature for his wrath. Did he take it all too far? Pick the “he” you think I’m referring to. I think they both fucked up. I think that’s the point of it all. I think Mary looked at the world that made her, at the people that made her, and I think she was furious with them. (She dedicated Frankenstein to her father—TO HER FATHER, MR. DEL TORO.) Mary Shelley was a teenage girl—how could she not be furious? She was an octopus confined in a tank.

Do you think Mary Shelley ever got to see a live octopus? I hope she did. Everyone should behold an octopus at some point.

Hey Mr. Del Toro, do you think I could I forgive myself, for the monster I made of me? Should I? Do I need to? 

One last question:

Did Mary Shelley know that she would become Prometheus to us, Mr. Del Toro? 

--

link to original substack post:

[andromachism]

why my favorite books are my favorite books

the master and margarita, bulgakov.

This was the first book I read when the pandemic started. I picked it up because of the person I liked at the time. I don't like that person anymore, but I love the book. It's a political satire with religious and supernatural fantasy elements. It’s a love story. It’s a love letter to literature. It’s the author's testimony and cry for help due to the censorship he faced. This book is everything. It brought back my pleasure for reading after doing it solely out of obligation for 3 years and for that alone it will always hold a special place in my heart. Also, the demonic black cat is really cool!

death with interruptions, saramago.

Saramago is my all-time favorite writer, and this is not my favorite book of his (that's Cain), but it is the first one I read, and I think it was the perfect introduction. It’s such a funny, beautiful, and sensitive story—unexpectedly romantic without losing Saramago’s usual sarcastic political criticism. It also incorporates some supernatural fantasy elements, as it is about Death taking a vacation. I like to read it when I want something with his style but lighter and quicker than his usual pace. I called it a perfect introduction to Saramago, but honestly, I think it’s just perfect.

(By the way, it’s quite interesting that when Saramago writes about everyone going blind or everyone stopping voting, something extremely tragic and almost dystopian happens, but when people stop dying, he decides to write a romance.)

posthumous memoirs of bras cubas, machado de assis.

Machado is everything to me. I was reading his books before I could properly understand his Portuguese, and much less what he was talking about. But as I grew up and fully understood him, this particular one got me in a chokehold. It's another story about death, but in this case, the deceased main character decides to write his memoir. It's satirical and obviously with supernatural elements. I love how Machado ridicules the elite society of his time while masking it with a likable protagonist who is actually an awful person and a completely mediocre human. So many parts of this story were crucial in my development as an adult, like when the protagonist memorizes quotes from famous authors to appear intellectual (something to be said about those annoyingly pretentious people writing essays about how bad everything popular is and quoting the same authors left and right). (Besides all of that, there is a chapter where a black butterfly flies into Bras' bedroom and lands on his father's portrait. A few chapters later, his father dies. A day before my grandfather died, a black butterfly flew into my room, and then his requiem mass happened on the day of Saint Blaise of Sebaste, who is called ‘Brás’ in Portuguese. This coincidence shook me to a point that will always make this book extremely personal to me.)

frankenstein, mary shelley.

As brilliant as Shelley is, this one is one of my favorites because it shaped me as a human being. When I first read it, I was 16 years old, struggling with my gender identity, sexuality, and body. Because of that, my relationship with my father fluctuated between non-existent and hateful. I was different, that was clear to everyone, and he hated it. So, reading about that creature was an enlightening experience about myself. I, too, felt like a creature—hateful and constructed with someone else’s parts, with none of it ever feeling truly mine. Frankenstein was to me what Paradise Lost was to the creature. I feel like a creation, wretched, helpless, and alone.

a storm of swords, grrm.

I list 'Death with Interruptions' as one of my favorites because of the author, and this one because of the genre. I love fantasy in all its forms, from small elements of it used as plot devices to high fantasy with extensive world-building and fictional beasts. A Song of Ice and Fire is my all-time favorite fantasy series, and A Storm of Swords is my favorite book in it, so it makes sense that this is the high fantasy representative on my list. Robb’s struggles and ultimate downfall will always be ingrained in my mind. The absolute dreadful feeling I got when I read, 'No one sang the words, but Catelyn knew “The Rains of Castamere” when she heard it,' cannot be replicated by any other work of fiction, I believe.

[cytocutie]

tag game sent over by @chiropteracupola :)

rules: list ten books that have stayed with you in some way, don’t take but a few minutes, and don’t think too hard - they don’t have to be the “right” or “great” works, just the ones that have touched you.

haha oops it's long. i'll go ahead and put my chain letter bit up here if you folks would like to have a crack at it: @atomic-madness , @the-atrium-of-fools , @another-sad-lieutenant ?

I'm gonna take "books" loosely—some of the pieces of writing that have affected me most were short stories. In no particular order:

1. "There Will Come Soft Rains", Ray Bradbury

is the house, broken, obsolete, and alone, still a house? the gentle death is far more painful than the violent one. oh shit i just realized how much this story influenced my d&d character

2. "A Fisherman of the Inland Sea", Ursula K. Le Guin

i have so many second-/third-generation immigrant feelings about this story. even if you could do it all again, better this time, there would always be something too late to be changed, it was already part of you... when you make a decision there's always something you leave behind... and then there's the ansible and the desperate futility of communicating with a world "you" cannot return to...

3. "A New Refutation of Time", Jorge Luis Borges

this one's an essay! well kind of also a prose poem. one of those works that found me at exactly the right time in my life to punch me in the gut. "The world, unfortunately, is real. I, unfortunately, am Borges." sooo true girlie.

4. Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer

i don't know what to say just please read this if you haven't. it changed the way i love

5. Pachinko, Min Jin Lee

i do enjoy a good intergenerational epic! despite spanning a century, each character was written with so much love and humanity. this book sat down in my stomach in 2018 and has not budged since.

6. The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer

7. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

speaking of epics with ensemble casts whose humanity breaks me. there's nothing i can say that hasn't already been said. i love People

everyone shut up about victor. the creature is so fucking transgender. i cannot emphasize enough how transgender the creature is. envisioned as Adam, cast as Satan, yet so often paralleling Eve. conceived as the perfect man, meticulously designed, and rejecting the design. bristling against his own body. the monster is Creation itself, creating itself. but i didn't give you that option! none of us are given that option. <-part of an unfinished diatribe ignited by my ap lit teacher

8. A Tale Dark and Grimm, Adam Gidwitz

10. The Unfolding of Language, Guy Deutscher

a silly trilogy and not one i particularly enjoy as an adult, but i found it very cathartic as an unwell nine-year-old with violent fantasies.

9. Superman from the 30's to the 70's

i inherited my affection for Superman from my dad, mostly through this anthology. at one point i had the first couple issues in it memorized. i got some very strange ideas about crime from this book before i learned enough about the modern world to realize that's not quite how things work

words (and art and ideas and loss and transformation) are so fucking cool you guys. this was my comfort book as a tween but i honestly hadn't thought of it in a while. i should go back and reread it

[bethanydelleman]

I love Lady Susan! I kept on postponing reading it for a very long time coz I did not like its synopsis wherever I read, plus I was apprehensive coz it was written in the form of letters. And then when I did eventually read it, it was only to complete the Jane Austen collection. But I was pleasantly surprised at how funny I found it! I know there are deeper issues like lady Susan abusing her daughter, but it's been written in such a wonderful way that I kept on giggling throughout the book. It was way later when I came to know that it was actually the first book that JA wrote and that too at such a young age! Man she most definitely understood human characters way more deeply than I ever could! But on a different note, I would love to have lady Susan's confidence and her manipulation tactics - in a good way. The older I get, the more I realise the importance of getting your way out of people without aggressively fighting for it. Plus, in those olden days, who could blame LS for trying to get a rich husband for herself and her daughter? A woman couldn't even own something and was entirely dependent on her husband for everything. But the lighthearted manner in which Austen wrote on such a complex subject, along with being able to show us all sides of the story, AND having a heroine who was unabashed about her multiple relationships, really speaks volumes to how great a writer she was!

YES! When I read Lady Susan for the first time I had no idea what to expect but it was just an absolute delight.

I feel a lot like you do, if Lady Susan was nicer to her daughter I might actually fully root for her. Given the unfairness of the system at the time, I like her smashing the patriarchy and stringing along three men at once. She's the ultimate Gaslight Girlboss, which is not good thing, but it's satisfying somehow? (I too wish I could be a Gaslight Girlboss, but for good).

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and Lady Susan really do just make me amazed at what a very young person can write. It shows how astute an observer Austen was even at a young age. She uses the epistolary style so well too, I usually find novels written in letters difficult to read.