Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have mixed feelings about this one. I’ve been vaguely looking forward to reading it for decades. It sounded intriguing—a progenitor of both science fiction and horror, and much more thoughtful than a mere “monster” book. My impetus for starting it this month is an upcoming 8th grade field trip to the Bakken Museum of electricity which features an exhibit on Frankenstein and Mary Shelley.

Possible spoilers below.

In general, I found much of the book to be plodding, even taking into account the different literary style of its era. (I don’t usually have much trouble with 19th century literature.) The bulky frame story felt awkward and overwrought. Victor Frankenstein was such a miserable wretch that I found myself dreading reading anything else about him. I wanted to scream at Shelley, “Show, don’t tell!” As Frankenstein’s tragedy’s mount, it felt like every paragraph was a variation of, “No one can conceive the anguish I suffered…” Ugh. The foreshadowing was also heavy-handed by current standards, leaving few real plot surprises.

Hooray for chapter 10! Enter the monster. This is where the story came to life, so to speak, for me. I knew the monster would be more than what I expected from cartoons and film, but I was still surprised when he delivered eloquent lines like this, “Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us.” I love a monster with a strong vocabulary and proper elocution. I found his story to be fascinating and tragic, and spent much of the rest of the book rooting for him. The whole book was worth it for the monster’s story. I can see why the story became famous. It raises profound questions about the nature of humanity and evil.

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Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A delicious romp through ‘80s geekdom! This is the sort of book I could have read in a single night, wrapping up before breakfast (as I once did with Ender’s Game some twenty years ago). Alas, sleep is at a higher premium these days, so I paced myself.

I was immediately taken in by the setting: a dystopian future where people spend their happiest hours immersed in “The Oasis,” a virtual reality where you can be the superhero/knight/wizard/jedi of your fantasies. (Think of a global, genreless World of Warcraft with infinite scalability and no lag.) The public schools have even gone virtual, since simulated schools have better facilities, stellar libraries, and no bullies (the school zones don’t allow physical contact between characters and you can mute anybody you don’t want to listen to). Meanwhile, the real world crumbles into islands of urban slums separated by Mad Maxish no-man’s-lands. The setting was painted in broad strokes leaving plenty of room for my piqued imagination to fill in the gaps. Vivid scenes gave the basic flavor. I reveled, for example, in the image of a public bus that traveled between cities (a la Greyhound). Fully armored, with a defensive gun deck up top, the passengers jacked into their VR rigs as soon as they boarded and spent the entire trip lost in another world.

The plot is built around an epic quest within the Oasis to locate the late lead-programmer’s Easter Egg, a deeply hidden golden ticket worth a dazzling real-world fortune to whoever finds it. The programmer built his puzzles and clues around the obsessions of his youth: 1980s geek culture (movies, music, video games, and classic role-playing games). To say more will lead to spoilers, and half the fun is applying your own knowledge to the puzzles, but I will say that there were many joyous epiphanies along the way as treasured memories of Atari cartridges and D&D adventures were given new life.

When I first rated the book I put four stars, but I’ve been considering the line between “really liked it” and “amazing” ever since. After writing this review, it’s clear that the overall reading experience was in amazing territory. With that said, the novel was not without flaws. Characters were often two-dimensional, and there were a number of relationships that didn’t quite gel. Foreshadowing was of the un-subtle variety. The plot was predictable, though a dash of cyberpunk toward the end was a pleasant surprise. In short, I kinda wish this wasn’t Cline’s first novel. In defense, one might argue that the source material suffers from all of these flaws in spades, but I think that’s a copout. Better writing would have improved the depth of immersion. Despite this, however, Cline easily managed to dunk me deep enough to have a blast. I want to read a book like this every summer.

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