October Wrap Up

 

October ended up being a pretty awful reading month for me. It's a shame, because I had been saving up some of my darker reads for now and I was excited to do a little seasonal theming. I ended up completely losing my reading momentum with The Last Man, which I did not enjoy at all. I compounded the problem next by picked up The Witches, which was interesting, but way too dense for my mood at the time. I ended up only finishing three books and falling woefully short of my goals. Here's what I ended up completing:

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

The Last Man by Mary Shelley

The Witches by Stacy Schiff

I'm hoping to get myself back on track in November. My goal is to finish reading the books I set for myself in October and then continue chipping away at my other reading challenges as best I can. Here's my list:

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey 

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

The Last Policeman by Ben Winters

Thorn by Intisar Khanani

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee

Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton

When I'm not enjoying reading, I don't feel like myself. Hopefully November will set me straight again. 

The Witches by Stacy Schiff

After the disaster that was reading The Last Man, I was anxious to get into another book and revive my interest in reading. Next up on my list was The Witches by Stacy Schiff. This nonfiction novel about the Salem witch trials was part of my True Books 2020 Challenge. I had been saving this one until October to read, as it seemed to be a good match for the season. I live close enough to Salem to go there for a weekend, so I was hoping to learn about all about what happened back in 1692, and then go see some of the historical sites. Covid has ruined that plan, at least for now, but I was still interested to learn about this weird part of American history.

The Witches is an extremely detailed account of the hysteria that gripped Salem in 1692 when a group of teenage girls went into strange fits and began accusing their neighbors of practicing witchcraft. As their Puritan community believed wholeheartedly in the existence of witches, the girls' stories were taken seriously and the accused were arrested and put on trial. The Puritan community was soon turned on its head, as more and more accusations were made and more and more "witches" were rounded up and put in prison. Some were prosecuted and were put to death, while others saved themselves by confessing to consorting with the devil and naming other witches for the witch hunters to round up. Neighbors accused neighbors, daughters accused mothers, and husbands accused wives. Before the fervor died down, Massachusetts executed fourteen women, five men, and two dogs for witchcraft, and imprisoned many more. The incident tore the community apart and left deep wounds that took generations to heal.

Schiff conveys the story chronologically, starting by giving the reader a picture of how Salem was founded and what it was like to live there in the 1690s. From there, she describes the initial accusations and traces how the fear and suspicion always present in Salem started a runaway sequence of events that led to a lot of innocent people being killed. She discusses the trials themselves, the executions that took place, and the eventual petering out of the mayhem once it became unsustainable. The Salem Witch Trials are one of those events from history that seem unbelievable, but Schiff does a nice job giving as much context and reasoning as possible to explain how it happened.

I learned a lot of interesting things from this novel, but not without a price. This was obviously a well-researched and expertly constructed account, but part of it were very dry. The middle of the story was especially challenging, as it felt like a lot of the same type of information being given over and over. There are only so many accounts of ridiculously false testimony you can read before getting bored. There were also a lot of moments where Schiff detoured into the background of various people, which I felt stopped the momentum of the book. Additionally, there were a lot of names to keep track of, and I found it impossible to keep everyone straight. It wasn't necessary to remember exactly who everyone was to understand the overall narrative, but it did bother me a bit that I couldn't recall who everyone was as I was reading. 

Overall, I did enjoy my experience with The Witches, but I found parts of it difficult to get through. I think that maybe I wasn't in the right mood for another long, dense read after The Last Man, so part of this is my fault. I ended up learning a lot though, so it was a successful experience. I won't remember this as one of my favorite nonfiction reads, but I will definitely remember what I learned about history from it. I am still hoping to visit Salem myself one day, once this Covid nightmare is over. 

Challenge Tally

True Books 2020: 13/14

Total Books Read in 2020: 72

The Last Man by Mary Shelley

Trigger warning: This novel is about a plague that ends humanity, so anyone struggling with anxiety about Covid might want to steer clear.  

After finishing Frankenstein earlier this month, I moved onto another novel by Mary Shelley, The Last Man. I picked this up for my Then Versus Now Challenge. Prior to doing research for this challenge, I had no idea that Mary Shelley even wrote any other novels, and I was really interested to try something else from her. I have a very high opinion of Frankenstein, so I went into my reading hoping for something with similar, creepy vibes, or maybe another novel full of interesting psychological questions. What I ended up getting was depression, one literal nightmare, and quite a bit of disappointment.

The novel begins with a framing device - an unnamed narrator, while exploring a cave on a holiday in Greece, stumbles into the long lost cave of an ancient Seer. He finds several papers scattered around the cave, which he translates and assembles into a manuscript. The manuscript contains the story of the last man alive on earth, which the seer recorded from a prophetic vision she received centuries ago. The narrator shares this manuscript with us, and that forms the plot of the novel. In this way, the novel is supposed to be a glimpse into our future, and explains the story of how humanity will end from the point of view of the last living person.

The narrator of the manuscript is Lionel Verney, a young man living in England in the year 2074. He begins by explaining his history, beginning with his birth to a disgraced nobleman. Due to the tarnished reputation of his father, he starts out in a lowly station in life until he meets and befriends a young man named Adrian, the Earl of Windsor. The monarchy has been abolished in favor of a democratic republic by this time, but the royal family has retained social prominence and titles. Adrian lifts Lionel up out of his rough, gloomy life and introduces him to art, music, and culture. They become like brothers and from that moment forward, he lives the life of a gentleman. The path Adrian sets him on eventually leads him to Idris, his one true love. It also introduces Lionel's beloved sister Perdita to Lord Raymond, another prominent nobleman that she eventually marries. Both couples go on to have children and live together in a manor in the idyllic English countryside.

Before long, however, their happy world is shattered by an unusually virulent plague that sweeps from Middle Eastern and Asian nations to the rest of the world. The sickness doesn't discriminate; both rich and poor people become infected equally, and all who contract it die. Lionel and his friends try quarantining and helping the ill as much as they can, but unlike previous versions of the plague that they have encountered, this one doesn't gradually fade away. Instead, it becomes stronger, taking more and more people each day. Years go by with all of humanity living in constant fear of being sick. As population grows smaller and smaller, Lionel and his family decide to gather as many survivors together as possible and leave England to seek their fortunes elsewhere. They are hoping to find a safe haven, but they soon discover that the illness follows them wherever they go. Throughout it all, Lionel records their struggles and reactions to the tragedy unfolding around them, presenting a harrowing story about the end of mankind.

The Last Man was a difficult read for me, for reasons beyond the heavy subject matter. Right from the beginning, pacing was an issue. This novel is about 500 pages, and the plague doesn't enter into matters until right around page 200. All the time prior to that was spent detailing Lionel's life, which is full of dramatic turns of fortune and cliched romances that feel like they belong in a much older book. This novel was published in 1826, but it felt like it could have been 50 years earlier. I was reminded of Tom Jones or Don Quixote a bit while reading, just without the comedy. The characters had that similar feel of being larger than life with clear, distinctive personality traits, but at the same time being completely unbelievable as human beings. Flat and overly virtuous, they did nothing to engage me in their stories and I consistently struggled to feel any connection to them. This beginning section was, simply put, dreadfully boring, and it took me longer than it should have to get through. I just wasn't excited to pick it up.

In addition to being an apocalyptic novel, this also falls partially into roman à clef territory, with Shelley modeling Adrian and Lord Raymond after her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and her friend, Lord Byron, respectively. As such, her descriptions of them are overly effusive in their praise, to the point of ridiculousness. Both Adrian and Raymond are impossible attractive, good, and noble characters, and the narrator is sure to remind us of this at every available opportunity. I believe at one point, Lionel waxes poetic about Adrian's eyelashes. Much of the narration did not read like a man speaking about dear friends. It read like an infatuated woman describing men she was attracted to, which is exactly what it was. This further damaged the unbelievability of the characters and further disconnected me from the story.

Another consistent issue while reading was the world-building, which was almost non-existent. It was very easy to forget that this story was taking place in the distant future because almost nothing was different than how the world would have been in 1826. I don't blame Mary Shelley for not being able to predict future technology accurately. After all, the world we live in today would be utterly unrecognizable to her, and The Last Man takes place over fifty years from right now. However, I do think some attempt should have been made at depicting future advancements. This novel starts off in the year 2074 and ends up around the year 3000, and people are still traveling by horse and carriage and living and working the same way they did in the 19th century. Aside from a throwaway reference to traveling by air in a balloon-type conveyance and her prediction that England would eventually do away with the monarchy, there were no details that would suggest this novel is set in the future. In an attempt to gloss over this, Shelley actually gives very few specific details about how life works for her characters, which had the effect of making the setting quite bland. Much like in Frankenstein, she wrote a story that was technically science fiction, but she was not interested in the details of how her world worked. However, her omission of specifics was fine in Frankenstein. The novel was short and the vagueness increased its mystery and suspense. Here, however, in a 500 page novel, the omission of details was a noticeable flaw that made the story worse. 

I could really continue on at length describing issues I had with this book, but the last one I'll get into here was the endless misery of the plot. This is an apocalyptic book about a deadly pandemic. Obviously, it was not intended to be lighthearted. However, its slow pacing and relatively empty plot made the dread, fear, and sadness of the characters very difficult to endure. Once the plague comes into the story, we have about 300 pages of abject suffering as the characters move from place to place, slowly dying. As I mentioned before, the characters weren't realistic enough to actually get attached to, so the reading wasn't difficult because it was emotionally draining. It was difficult because it was boring and joyless. The plot didn't really raise interesting questions or make astute observations about humanity. It was just abject misery for hundreds of pages. To make matters worse, at one point I fell asleep while reading and had a terrible dream that my husband was slowly dying from a plague, which was an absolutely terrible experience. I don't think the fact that we are currently in a pandemic influenced this reaction. It was just that I was reading page upon page of people dying in this book and it bubbled up in my sleep. I don't think a book has ever given me an actual nightmare before, so this was a first for me.

There was very little that I liked about The Last Man. I didn't mind the ending, which I thought contained the right amount of melancholy, for once. I also thought some of the writing was beautiful. There are a handful of quotes throughout the pages that struck me as quite smart and relatable to the current situation the world is in right now. However, anything good about this novel was swallowed up in the dreary, largely uneventful plot and unrealistic character portrayals. This was undoubtedly my worst reading experience of the year, because not only is this poorly written (my unenlightened opinion, I know), it spoiled all my reading momentum for the month. I'm not going to get to half the books I wanted to read in October, and it's because of this novel. It made me want to avoid reading, which is not a feeling I'm used to having. I literally never quit books. If I did, I would have quit reading this one.

 Challenge Tally

Then vs. Now: 21/27

Total Books Read in 2020: 71

  

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

 

October is the perfect time for spooky reads, so I wisely saved Frankenstein for this month. It's one of my favorite classics and I've read it a handful of times over the years. I've never blogged about it here though, so I decided to include it in my Then Versus Now Challenge. I'll be comparing it with another Mary Shelley novel (The Last Man) later on in the month. Now, I know what you're thinking - Mary Shelley wrote another novel? She did, in fact. She published somewhere in the neighborhood of seven fiction novels and did some travel writing and poetry editing as well. Frankenstein is by far her most famous and well-known work though, and the impact it's had on the world of horror and science fiction is incredible. Everyone, even people who have never read the novel, have a basic idea of what it's about, and new adaptations of the story continue to come out year after year. It's one of those larger than life novels that has grown to be more than just its 200 pages.

The plot of the novel concerns Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant young scientist who manages to discover the secret of how to create a living being while attending university. He becomes obsessed with the idea of actually creating life and works feverishly on constructing a man. He succeeds in doing this, but once his creature takes its first breath, he is immediately horrified by what he has done. The creature repulses him, with its large proportions and garish facial features and he immediately abandons it. 

The creature, who remains unnamed, goes out into the world alone and manages to educate himself. His unnatural appearance causes everyone to shun him, so he has to live in isolation, learning skills like reading and speaking by spying on others. Once he has learned enough about society to understand that he can never really participate in it, he becomes enraged at his abandonment. Eventually, he tracks his creator down and asks him to build a mate for him. Victor at first agrees to his request, but later finds that he can't in good conscience release another monster into the world. His change of heart enrages the creature, who embarks on a quest of revenge that threatens everyone Frankenstein holds dear. Realizing his creation must be stopped, Victor embarks on a quest to destroy his monster at all costs. 

One of the best things about Frankenstein is how deep it is. This isn't just a scary story about a monster; in fact, its exploration of morals and ethics is a more prominent feature of the text than its horror elements. The book raises a lot of complex questions. For example, Is it possible to take scientific discovery too far? Should some theories be left untested? Is Victor solely responsible for the actions of his creation, or is the monster, once educated, responsible for himself? Did Victor have a duty to create a mate for the creature to save his family, or was he right to abandon that plan? If he killed his creation, would it be murder? This is a fun book to discuss with other readers, because different opinions will inevitably prevail. Myself, I can't help but side with the monster most of the time. I don't condone his violence, but I understand his anguish. Shelley did an excellent job creating a sympathetic antagonist in him. He is an interesting character, with layers of feelings and motivations.

Another strength of this novel is its atmosphere. From the picturesque mountains of Geneva to the desolate Arctic glaciers, Mary Shelley presents a rich world that perfectly suits her dark story. Her description of the monster is very creepy as well. Frankenstein tried to create him to be beautiful, but he soon discovers the the large, long proportions he chose, flowing black hair, and stretched skin are monstrous when brought to life. He has the shape of a human, but there is enough that is off about him to make everyone that sees him recoil in horror. Imagining what this would look like is great fun and gives the story a truly dark mood. While there aren't a lot of flashy action sequences here, Shelley is very effective at building a quieter kind of horror that grows and grows throughout the novel. The suspense is terrific and I was totally engaged in the story, even though I have read it several times before.

There is one element of the story that does bother me, however - Victor's near-constant fits of nerves and fainting spells. There are several sections of the story in which his guilty conscience and grief leave him in a coma-like state. He is laid up in bed for weeks at a time, with friends, family members, and even strangers dropping everything to sit at his bedside. I assume that Shelley was trying to get across the extreme horror and guilt he felt, and nervous illnesses are a common element in novels from this time period, but the repetition grew boring and broke the flow of the story. Ultimately though, this is a small issue and doesn't detract too much from the overall quality of the novel.

So, I really ended up enjoying my reread of Frankenstein. It remains one of my favorite creepy classics. Its subtle horror and dark plot make it the perfect October read, and its intellectual elements make it a thought-provoking one as well. I'm really interested to try another Mary Shelley novel next and see if I will discover another favorite.

Challenge Tally

Then vs. Now: 20/27

Total Books Read in 2020: 70

September Wrap Up

 

September flew by amazingly fast, didn't it? I feel like we can't possibly be at the end of the month yet. I suppose the start of the new school year sped everything up for me. Even so, I did manage to read everything I set out to read. Here is what I finished this month:

We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks by E. Lockhart

Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi

The Warden by Anthony Trollope

The Hating Game by Sally Thorne

Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston

 My favorites of the month were Helter Skelter and The Hating Game. I was particularly surprised by The Hating Game, which was a contemporary new adult romance. I very rarely read from this genre, but I really enjoyed it and plan to try more books like it in the future. 

My least favorite this month was The Warden, a Victorian classic that I found to be tedious. It didn't hate it though, so all in all, my month was pretty successful. Nothing is going to go on my favorites list, but nothing was too bad.

I've reserved some of the creepier books from my various challenges for October. Here's the plan:

 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley 

The Last Man by Mary Shelley

The Witches by Stacy Schiff

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey 

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

The Last Policeman by Ben Winters

Thorn by Intisar Khanani

 

I'm hoping to finish these up a bit early and squish in another book, but some of these are long, so I'm not sure if that will be possible. In any case, I'm hoping to keep up with my blogging a bit better. I let my reviews pile up this month and it wasn't fun!

Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi

 

The next book on my True Books 2020 list was Helter Skelter, the famous true crime novel about the Manson murders. I'd been interested in this book ever since I read and enjoyed In Cold Blood years ago. I wanted to try another true crime classic, and as this one is so highly regarded, it seemed like a good choice. I went into my reading not knowing too much about the subject aside from the fact that Manson was some kind of cult leader that ordered his followers to commit horrific crimes in the late 60s. So, I knew this story would be weird and creepy, but now that I've finished reading it, I can say that I definitely underestimated how bizarre and tragic it would actually be.

Helter Skelter was written by Vincent Bugliosi, the lead prosecutor of the Manson case. He opens the novel with a thorough and chilling description of the Tate murder scene, describing in detail how the bodies of five people, including the pregnant movie star Sharon Tate, were discovered by a housekeeper arriving at Tate's house on the early morning of August 9, 1969. Terrified by the gruesome and bloody scene, she ran screaming from the house and alerted the police. From that point forward, a massive investigation was launched that captivated the world. 

Over the course of the next several months, a strange story emerged concerning a curiously enigmatic man named Charles Manson and his "family," a group of men and women that lived with him in the desert. Manson had a lot of strange ideas, not the least of which was "Helter Skelter," his belief that a race war would soon end most life on earth, leaving him to rule over everyone that was left. His followers believed in his ideas unequivocally, and appeared willing to follow any instructions he gave them, including instructions to commit acts of violence. Manson and several of his "family" members were eventually linked to the Tate murders, as well as the murders of the Leno and Rosemary La Bianca, a married couple whose bodies were discovered in another horrifically bloody crime scene the next day. 

After Bugliosi explains how Manson and his accomplices were arrested, the novel shifts into the trial phase of the story. He goes through his work on the case step-by-step, explaining exactly how he prosecuted the defendants. A copious amount of detail is included, including pieces of interviews, descriptions of evidence, and court transcripts. The result is a genuine courtroom drama, full of literally unbelievable twists and turns. After the trial section ends, Bugliosi explains the fate of several people involved in the case and wraps up with some final thoughts on Manson's personality and influence. 

I really enjoyed this novel, but I had a tough time summarizing it adequately for this post. What I wrote falls woefully short of encapsulating everything Helter Skelter contains. There is an incredible amount of detail in this book's 670 pages. Bugliosi does an excellent job of presenting a vast amount of information in a way that is both organized and engaging. The pacing works well and although the novel was long, I wasn't bored while reading. He covers not only the facts of the case, but goes into enough background detail to try and show how matters progressed to the extreme points they did. This is one of those "truth is stranger than fiction" type of stories, and Bugliosi's meticulous research and clear explanations really helped to make this utterly bizarre situation understandable.

What stands out the most in Helter Skelter, of course, is Charles Manson and the incredible control he exerted over his family. He was able to convince them to commit a wide variety of crimes, ranging from burglary to murder, all to support his personal racist and sexist philosophies. Bugliosi explains that Manson was able to lure people to his side using a combination of hallucinogenic drugs, sex, and violence. He attracted lonely, often mentally ill, people to himself and exploited their weaknesses to serve his needs. There was something about him that many people found irresistible, and diving into his story to try and figure out what that special something might have been was fascinating. However, Bugliosi is careful not to glorify Manson throughout the text. His tone is appropriately somber throughout and he frequently reminds the reader that there is nothing glamourous or alluring about what Manson and his family did.   

Helter Skelter is an excellent account of a very unique crime in American history. The story is disturbing and fascinating and Bugiosi's insider account of it is very well-written. This is mandatory reading for true crime fans, and I'm happy to have picked it up for my challenge. 

Challenge Tally

True Books 2020: 12/14

Total Books Read in 2020: 69

The Warden by Anthony Trollope

 

Back when I was putting together my Classics Club list, I knew that I wanted to include several books from the Victorian era. It's one of the literary time periods that I really enjoy, so after selecting several novels that I already owned for the challenge, I did a quick Google search to see if there were any notable authors that I was missing. The name that came up the most often that I didn't recognize was Anthony Trollope. I investigated a little bit further and learned that Trollope was a prolific author during his time and was probably the most well known for his Chronicles of Barsetshire, a collection of six novels set in the fictional county of Barsetshire, England. The first novel in the series, and his first major success as an author, was The Warden. Interested to try this new-to-me author, I put The Warden on my list and picked up a copy at my favorite used book store. As the novel is fairly short (only 284 pages in my edition), and as I knew that my reading time was about to be reduced by school back starting up, I decided that this month was the perfect time to give it a try.

The plot of the novel follows Septimus Harding, a clergyman in Barsetshire whose affable nature has made him a favorite of the community. His main duty is to serve as the warden of Hiram's Hospital, a small almshouse that provides medical care and living accommodations to old, infirm, and penniless men. The charity hospital was established in 1434 by John Hiram, who created the foundation in his will. He left land and money to the church for the maintenance of the hospital, and since that time, his bequest has greatly increased in value. In fact, the land now produces much more income than the almshouse needs. The excess funds have been used to increase the salary of the warden, and over the years, the position has become extremely well-paying. By the time Septimus accepted the position, the salary had ballooned to 800 pounds a year, plus a spacious home to live in on the hospital property. The money and benefits of the position, however, are not something that Mr. Harding thinks a lot about. He tacitly accepted the position and its salary when it was offered to him and has been performing his duties admirably for several years.  

His quiet, happy life is thrown into disarray, however, when a few other churches in the area are implicated in financial scandals. Local reformers begin looking for more examples of financial mismanagement in Barsetshire's religious institutions, and the large salary paid to the warden of Hiram's Hospital catches their attention. A young man named John Bold takes up the case and leads the charge against the inflated salary, claiming that the excess funds generated by the land should go to the hospital's patients, rather than be used to line a clergyman's pockets. Bold avoids attacking Mr. Harding directly, as his relationship to him is complicated. He has known and respected Harding since he was a child and is actually in love with his daughter, Eleanor. Even so, he feels compelled to correct what he feels is a grave, moral wrong, and he moves forward with his advocacy on behalf of Barsetshire's citizens.

Mr. Harding is devastated by this turn of events. He is distressed at the idea of people believing him to be a thief, and as newspapers begin to pick up the story and paint him in a negative light, he is depressed and humiliated. To make matters worse, he begins to doubt the fairness of his salary himself. He never stopped to consider if his 800 pounds a year was excessive before, and now that he is forced to think about it, he starts to think that maybe Mr. Bold has a point. Determined to do the right thing, Mr. Harding must decide how to move forward. Should he sit back and allow the church to crush the call for reforms with legal maneuvering, or should he give up being the warden of Hiram Hospital and put his conscience at ease?

I'm going to be honest. I struggled with The Warden. I'm not really sure why, because there isn't anything obviously wrong with it. It's the kind of classic that I should love, but I found myself consistently bored with it. It wasn't even 300 pages, which is amazingly short for a Victorian novel, and I took ages to finish it. Part of the problem was that this book had the effect of a powerful sleeping pill on me. I started nodding off almost every single time I picked it up. No matter how strongly I resolved to sit and make my way through it, I ended up disengaged within a few pages. I think the issue was that the story was about so little besides the warden's salary. Every page featured someone agonizing about it. Mr. Harding was always in a state of moral crisis over it, John Bold was always torn between duty and friendship over it, and various other supporting characters were always either upset or pleased over it. The plot was laser-focused on the moral questions surrounding this single issue and it didn't make for thrilling reading.

That's not to say that Trollope didn't make good points or paint a pretty picture with this story. His exploration of church hypocrisy and reformers raised interesting questions and his writing had a cheeky quality that frequently made me smile. Mr. Harding was a very sympathetic character and his firm sense of right and wrong was quite endearing. The relationships between the characters were complex, with lots of conflicting feelings to humanize them and add complications to the plot. I even appreciated the ending, which was a little darker than I was expecting. There were lots of things to like here. I just didn't particularly love any of it.

One more small, but frustrating difficulty I encountered was with terminology. Trollope used a lot of words that I was not familiar with in relation to the hospital and the church. I could figure most things out using context, but there was an usual amount of language that I was not familiar with throughout the novel. The fault for this frustration is mine, of course, but it did not help improve my reading experience. 

So obviously, The Warden is not destined to go down as one of my favorite classics. I'm not ready to give up on Anthony Trollope though. I feel like I haven't read the best of his work yet, and I definitely want to try a few more of his novels in the future. For now though, it's enough that I tried a new author and crossed another title off my Classics Club list.      

 

Challenge Tally

Classics Club (#54 on my list): 77/100 books completed

Total Books Read in 2020: 68