October 2025: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
To many readers, who have perhaps known Frankenstein only at second hand, the original may well come as a surprise. When Mary Shelley began it, she was only 18, though she was already Shelley’s mistress and Byron’s friend. In her preface she explains how she and Shelley spent part of a wet summer with Byron in Switzerland, amusing themselves by reading and writing ghost stories. Her contribution was Frankenstein, a story about a student of natural philosophy who learns the secret of imparting life to a creature constructed from bones he has collected in charnel-houses. The story is not a study of the macabre, as such, but rather a study of how many uses his power, through science, to manipulate and pervert his own destiny, and this makes it a profoundly disturbing book.
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Suggested Indie Bookstores:
Park Road Books (Charlotte, NC)
The Book Shop (Nashville, TN)
The Last Bookstore (Los Angeles, CA)
Strand (New York, NY)
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Favorite Quotes:
“It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things, or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my enquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or, in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world.”
“If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be nearly free; but now we are moved by every wind that blows, and a chance word or scene that that word may convey to us.”
“But he found that a traveller’s life is one that includes much pain amidst its enjoyments. His feelings are for ever on the stretch; and when he begins to sink into repose, he finds himself obliged to quit that on which he rests in pleasure for something new, which again engages his attention, and which also he foresakes for other novelties.”
“I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now crime has degraded me beneath the meanest animal. No guilt, no mischief, no malignity, no misery, can be found comparable to mine. When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil.”
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Other Stuff I’m Into Right Now:
Snickers with peanut butter
Movie night
Djerf Avenue pajamas
Dogs sitting in the passenger seat
London Fog Tea Lattes
Crew socks
Hotel Transylvania
