Alexander the Great

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley Started: 28 August 2012 Finished: 4 September 2012 What an insanely good novel! General thoughts I read this novel in English, and English is my second/third language. I speak and understand English very fluently, but novels like this one remind me that I'm not a native speaker. The style is very bombastic, but I knew that when I started reading. It's typical for the time, and this is a classic in the genre. It was a struggle to get through at some points, and I frequently had to re-read sentences, but I enjoy a good challenge. The story Frankenstein is one of those stories which has been adapted numerous times. It has been made into movies, used as inspiration for other stories, been simplified for younger readers, made into plays, etc. Naturally, I knew the story. I knew that 'Frankenstein' is the name of the man who made the 'monster', and not of the 'monster' himself. I knew the main events of the story. That said, it is a great accomplishment of Mary Shelley's that I was still fascinated when reading, and that I still felt suspense and curiosity. Frankenstein tells a story of three men, two of whom feel that they are the most unlucky creatures having ever wandered the Earth. We read both their stories, one a bit more than the other, and Shelley drags us into their worlds and their minds. We get to know them on an intimate level, and most importantly, we get shown what their motives are. Up until the very end, I never felt like I was told who I should feel sorrier for, and I appreciated that. I loved the descriptions of the countries and the travels, showing a nice general picture of 18th-century Europe. It is amazing how much knowledge a 19-year-old girl had of Europe in the 18th century. Mary Shelley understands the art of showing and not merely telling. The story begins with Frankenstein's parents meeting, and that immediately gives the reader an incredible insight into his background and character. We meet the 'monster' from his very creation as well. We witness their changes of heart. We are given the circumstances in which they made their decisions, and it's up to the reader to figure out who they side with, and if they side with anyone. I felt so much compassion for the 'monster'. I know a lot of people feel this for Frankenstein as well, but I couldn't. I feel he brought it on himself first and foremost - for a man of both science and philosophy, he really didn't think his project through. But most of all, his initial reaction when the 'monster' came to life, and all the subsequent reactions, were very unfair, premature and narrow-minded. The original vs adaptations I feel that this original work far transcends any later adaptation. So many essential parts of the story were left out - essential because they added to the feeling that the writer evokes, and the compassion. Later adaptations mainly seem to go for the sensation angle, and I don't think that was Shelley's intention at all.

This completely goes for me as well. I'm not a pisces, by the way.

English is my second/third language, so reading Virginia's works is not easy for me, especially given my age. I'm fascinated by her, though, and I've read a few biographies. For now, I read about her life, both in books and on the internet. I hope that in time, I can read her books. I have Orlando, A Room of One's Own/Three Guineas, Selected Letters and Mrs. Dalloway in my bookcase. I've only read the last one, and it was a struggle to read at first because of the language, but in the end I enjoyed it very much. I think I'd have to re-read it to fully appreciate the work, though.

Strangely enough, it's the only one I've read by Jane Austen (so far)!

I'm a student and still live with my parents, so I have to keep my books in my room. I have about 2/3 of a wall filled with books, and a smaller set of shelves for magazines and schoolbooks. I'm getting in trouble with space, though, and will have to find a solution soon! This is the 2/3 along the wall: click. These are blocks from Ikea put together. These are the magazines and schoolbooks: click. This is part of the furniture of a set that's scattered around the house and family.

The Journal of Dora Damage by Belinda Starling was "normal" for the first half, but after, and especially around 3/4 of the book, it turned really really absurd, then it got back to "normal".

My oldest book is an Everyman's Library Edition of Charles Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby. It's from 1930, making it 82 years old.

I use Delicious Library. It's offline software that does the same thing I see programs like collectorz and bookCAT do, but the best part is that they do it for free. You can make as many shelves as you can, it has a feature to scan your book's ISBN and they'll collect the data for you. You can do this for books, movies, games, electronics and other posessions all in one program. I like it very much and the lay-out is also very nice. You can add your own notes as well.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides I had a very hard time finding an edition I liked, in English, at a reasonable price. Harry Potter series by JK Rowling It'd be easy to purchase them again, but I'd save the Dutch paperback versions because they have sentimental value to me. I've had them for years, and book 5 to 7 were books we waited for in the early morning hours. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, & Through The Looking-Glass (And What Alice Found There) by Lewis Carroll. This is a unique edition. It's small, but the cover is made of (hopefully and for that price probably fake) leather, and it's generally an older edition that also has that feel to it. I'm sure I'd never find it anywhere else. A book with Yeats poems, because it was given to me by my very best friend in the world and she'd had the copy for years herself and it was very dear to her. Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens Similar reason as #3 - it's a unique edition and quite old, and I got it cheap. I wouldn't find a version like it elsewhere, especially for that price.

I love to know things and learn new things. I don't necessarily mean facts - I also love to learn about different places in the world and what they're like, or can be like in the minds of authors. I like to read about different norms and values, which are so readily presented in a book. I like to see how characters react to situations and see how many different possibilities there are. I like to see the different ways can turn out. Apart from that, reading is an instinct and always has been. I remember times when I'm reading the ingredients and such on a cereal box over breakfast when having nothing to read, or reading tabloids because there's nothing else lying around. Reading's in my system, I'm programmed to read as I am to breathe and eat. It's not something I can stop doing. Finally, escapism is one of the reason, but not the main reason at all. I tend to use TV and TV series more for escapism than books.

My TBR pile is my personal terror. I have tons of books I bought that I still need to read. Only recently have I started to regularly buy books - since about three, four years ago, when I started college and went to study in a city with more cheaper bookstores. Now I have tons of books I still have to read at home. But I've been going to the library for years, and even when I tell myself to just return a book and not get a new one, I can't help myself. Even when I do manage to just return a book, that's only during periods where I really, really, really shouldn't have time to read because I need to focus on schoolwork. And then after those periods, I still find myself going to the library for just this one book to read, and then return with four books. I always feel pressured to read the books so I can start the TBR pile. I'd feel more free without the TBR pile, and I know the only way is to actually start reading them, but there's the library, etc.

It took a while for me to read the first really good book I'd read in 2012. This is my list: The Interpration of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld Mailman by J. Robert Lennon Silence of the Lambs by Robert Harris The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky Virginia Woolf by Alexandra Harris Sorry by Zoran Drvenkar Room by Emma Donoghue That's 7 books out of 33. I have to admit that 2012 is a bit of a slow year when it comes to reading good books. Especially in the first few months, I felt that most of the books I read were average at best. I've definitely had better years, but I also feel like it's picked up since June.

I have two series of audio books on my laptop - the Harry Potter series by JK Rowling, which I have previously read in print various times, and the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris. Both narrators, Stephen Fry and Johanna Parker, are very talented and do a remarkeable job. It must be a lot of hard work and require so much preparation to get the voices of different characters down, and then the stress on the words, the fluency, etc. I used to have them on my iPod, but it's only 4gb so when I wanted to put some new music on it, they were the first to go. My problem with audio books is mainly that I get very distracted listening to them. I can't just sit down and listen to something. I also like to have the visual book so I can re-read a sentence easily, while rewinding a recorded version takes a lot more effort. You have to find the starting point, etc. I also have a visual memory and find it hard to follow a long story when narrated. But kuods to those narrators who do such a good job!

I got my Kindle (non-touch) about a year ago. Initially, I was very excited about my purchase and I still don't regret it. I've downloaded tons of books for it. As someone who lives in Belgium, I use it most to download those books I can't find in any of the libraries I am a member of here. I have to say that I still prefer physical books. If I downloaded a book to my Kindle and later find it in the library, I'll borrow the book from the library. I use my Kindle most when travelling abroad. I do think I might be using it more in the future, though. One major downside is that it's so hard to organise your books on a Kindle. Collections only go one level deep and I'd like a more extensive way to organise my books in groups/shelves/collections.

Thanks, those suggestions help a lot! I'll be looking forward to the new book coming out, too

Thanks for the warm words of welcome, everyone! I'm sure I'll have a great time here.

The first time I didn't finish a book was when I read Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. I got to 80 pages, but then had to give up. This book had been loved by so many, and I just couldn't get into it! I think I was probably 10 years old, but I'm not sure. I felt disappointed with myself, felt like I had somehow done something wrong. The second time I had this was when I was 18, with Philip Roth's The Human Stain. The synopsis really appealed to me and it had been recommended to me by my Dutch teacher at the time. I looked forward to reading it, but it was a struggle from page one. I couldn't connect to the story at all, and it wasn't nearly well-paced or intriguing enough for me to get over that lack of connection. I also have a huge problem with both books and films where a young woman will fall head over heels in love with a grumpy and rude man who is much older than them. So that was a big disappointment. After that second time, there's been a few books I haven't finished. Before, I'd always go through because I'd feel guilty if I didn't. I still feel guilty when I do this, but I can get over it enough to just go on with the next book.

When I read an English classic, I always make a point of it to read it in its original language rather than read a translation. Immediately that brings a problem with it, however: that same language. English is my third language and it's often a bit of a struggle to understand as writing styles were so different, and so many other words are used. I enjoy this, though, but I can imagine it puts others off reading classics. I don't think that just because a book is a classic that means it's quality literature. I have read books that are considered classics and I couldn't comprehend why for the life of me. Some books are just overrated in my opinion, and a book isn't necessarily good to me because many people think so. What I like about reading classics is to go into the mind of the characters and see a story through that particular set of norms and values. I also like the time spent on observations and descriptions - the focus lies less on dialogue than in most books nowadays. Classics are also not as story-driven, and with that I mean that the other takes time to describe a place in more detail. Because books weren't as commercial before, I also find them more genuine and sincere at times. The author didn't compromise on a plot twist or character background/personality for commercial reasons. And yes, maybe they changed for political reasons, but then that makes it interesting - to see what was not done. Another interesting aspect is to see how the meaning of certain words have shifted or changed.

I'm now 21 and obviously adore reading. When I was in primary school, most of the other kids didn't really mind reading if the story was compelling, but they had to be encouraged and be given tasks about it before they'd actually read it. Most of the kids did read the really popular books at the time. In secondary school, I was the only person in my class group who liked to read. I think in my grade there must have been others who adored it as much as I did, but it wasn't exactly cool so I wouldn't know who that was. Especially in my group, there were some people who claimed they'd read five pages and forget what happened five pages ago. The main problem seemed to be that they couldn't concentrate and didn't want to try because they felt they had cooler and better things to do. When I went to college and studied history and English, those fields obviously meant I ran into more people who enjoyed reading. I was still astonished by how few there were, though. But there were quite a few people - much more than in secondary school - who liked reading alright but felt that they didn't have the time since they were busy studying, going out, etc. Reading was kind of a thing to do once in a blue moon for money. As a future teacher, I'm definitely grateful to the rise of the Young Adult genre. In my upcoming training I'll be working with it, and I do look forward to that. I think teenagers still read because there will always be some teenagers who love to read. I don't think there will ever come a time where nobody likes to read. But I do think that with e-readers, more teens will probably download books to their iPhone or e-readers. They'll also read more books from the library or in smaller/cheaper bookstores as books in large chains are often quite expensive.

I wasn't one of those kids who started to love reading because of Harry Potter, because I've loved reading books ever since I could read, basically. But some friends of mine who generally didn't like to read did enjoy this series tremendously. I read the first book when I was 10, and remember my parents getting the first two for St Nicholas and the third and fourth for Easter. Those were published by the time we got into it. For GoF, OotP, HBP and DH we had to wait until they were published, and I remember fondly how we would pre-order them and then have them delivered at 6AM on a Saturday morning as part of that service. I've always enjoyed the books. Sure, there have always been storylines I wasn't particularly interested in, and some character deaths seemed very pointless to me, and sometimes I wished Rowling had focused more on another aspect of the story - but overall, I loved them. There wasn't really one character I could completely identify with, but I could find elements of myself in different characters: the original shyness of Neville Longbottom, who later turns into a leader when times are rough, the academic eagerness of Hermione Granger, the imagination of Luna Lovegood, the complete obsession of Oliver Wood, etc. I know J.K. Rowling was influenced by many other works, but I think in this day and age it's so hard to write something completely original. It's almost impossible not to be influenced if you're an avid reader yourself. It doesn't really bother me, though, because in the end her world, while taking aspects from other worlds, as a whole is quite unique. I think what makes it so appealing is that mix of an alternate universe and the world as we know it. The fact that Harry doesn't know anything about wizards and magic and gradually has to discover was certainly a smart move, as we discover the magic world with him. As the books continued, I found the sole POV a limitation and while I understood why Rowling kept to it, I often wished to have read about certain events from another POV. I grew up with Harry Potter and have read all the books once, and some twice, not counting the languages in which I read them together. I don't re-read them every year, but it's really nice to just pick one up if it's been a few years, and I still enjoy them.

Hi, I've read quite a few historical fiction books, and quite a few novels concerning the Tudor dynasty. I wonder if anyone here can recommend me books that focus on Jane Seymour, or in which she plays a large role? Most books seem to feature Anne Boleyn, but I'd like to read more books with Jane Seymour.

I can only remember stealing a book once, a couple of years ago. My sister and I were on a sun holiday, and when we arrived at the hotel I discovered to my delight that they had two bookshelves. You could just grab a book from it, read it, and then put it back. It wasn't controlled - this was a hotel on the Greek island, and the books were mostly just books left behind by guests, they didn't purchase them or anything. By the time we had to leave, I was in the middle of one of their books. I'd checked via the internet and it wasn't available anywhere near me at home, so I decided to just take it with me to finish it. I don't even think it was missed since I doubt they kept track of the books there. I'm not even sure I stole it because it didn't mention in any info brochure or wasn't ever said by any member of staff that you had to put them back and couldn't take them home. But in all honesty, I guess I kind of stole it. I could never steal a book from a store or so, because I'm a really bad liar and I'd be blushing, nervous, and just way too obvious about it.

I've read a few pages in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but haven't been able to read a lot because my half sister, who lives quite far away, was visiting today so I spent some time with her. In the meanwhile, I'm wondering if it's a good idea to read the Millennium trilogy next. I'd want to read them all in one go, and I'm not sure I'll have the time. If I decide not to, my next read will be "Parrotfish" by Ellen Wittinger.

I keep a list of the books I've read in 2012 on my tumblr. I'm also on a Dutch Harry Potter forum where there is a topic to keep track of and shortly discuss the books you've read in a year, and you keep a list. This exists for TV episodes and movies as well. Of the sites mentioned here, I have a Goodreads account that is up to date. I post very short reviews and rate them, and I do have a few shelves. I like it because I can add books I read years ago as well. I have a LibraryThing account, but I have to update that and I made the account when I was procrastinating school work. Edit: When trying to import the books from my Goodreads account to LibraryThing, I noticed LibraryThing has a limit of 200 books (which in my case is ridiculously low). I refuse to pay for a service like that if I can do it for free elsewhere, so I won't be updating that account. I also remembered that I downloaded the program "Delicious Library" for free. It works like collectorz at first glance. I really like it!

I caught the finale of season 5 this Monday, and I'm not sure what to think. It certainly wasn't the worst season - that award goes to season 2 - and I sure liked the politics because it's not something often handled in vampire or supernatural series. It's really kind of in the middle for me, but I did enjoy it.