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Pink is Currently Reading

Pink is currently reading

Wolf Hall Trilogy- Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light (Thomas Cromwell, #1-3)

by Hilary Mantel

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Jan 21, 2026 10:50AM

Pink is currently reading

Frankenstein

by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

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Reading for the 2nd time

read in March 2013

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Pink said: " A gothic horror classic. A book that predates Dracula by almost 100 years and was written by Mary Shelley when she was just 19 years old.

Firstly, I LOVED the Penguin Classics Deluxe edition of this book. It had an amazing cover and started with a br A gothic horror classic. A book that predates Dracula by almost 100 years and was written by Mary Shelley when she was just 19 years old.

Firstly, I LOVED the Penguin Classics Deluxe edition of this book. It had an amazing cover and started with a brief introduction of circumstances of how it came to be written. Mary Shelley was holed up on the continent in the pouring rain for a few days, with her husband, the poet Percy Shelley and their friend Lord Byron, along with another guest Dr Polidori (Gabriele Rossetti's uncle) when Byron suggested they each write a 'ghost story'. Apparently Shelley and Byron abandoned their projects, while Poldori went on to write The Vampyre: A Tale a book that perhaps later inspired Dracula. I found this tale of the how the book came about enthralling in it's own way and it was a who's who of English literature of the time.

Now onto the actual story of Frankenstein. I guess I shouldn't detail what exactly happens, for those who haven't read the book. What I will say is that it isn't what films and cartoons of the 20th century have made Frankenstein out to be. My edition of the book contained the 1831 revisions that Mary Shelley made from the original 1818 edition, which re-wrote most of the first volume of the book (it containing 3 volumes) I found this first volume a quicker and more enthralling read and it contained mostly Dr Frankenstein's rendition of events. The next volume largely moved to his 'monsters' version of events and I was slightly disappointed by how slow this section became. I felt it detailed too much of the mundane and not enough of the horror that I was expecting. The last volume picked up again and ended off both Dr Frankenstein's tale and that of his creation.

So my thoughts on the book....I gave it 4 stars. It didn't completely grip me and like I said, I found the middle section a little slow and boring in places. However I think that this is such an important book and written almost 200 years ago, at the dawn of modern science (indeed when Mary Shelley writes about Dr Darwin she is referring to Erasmus Darwin, Charles' Grandfather, yet are the discoveries of Nature and evolution still to be made) I think the subject of what constitutes life and by which means we as humanity, should be enabled to create it, are as pertinent today, if not more so. ...more "

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(page 33 of 273)
— Jan 04, 2026 10:38PM

Aug 26, 2014 04:28AM · see review

Pink is currently reading

An Opinionated Guide to Women Painters

by Lucy Davies

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Dec 17, 2025 11:31AM

See all 4 books that Pink is reading…

Pink’s Quotes

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

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“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

tags: misattributed-kurt-cobain

3324 likes

“It is lucky that it is not windy today. Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy. Or else, it is raining and it is also windy: but you know that this evening it is your turn for the supplement of soup, so that even today you find the strength to reach the evening. Or it is raining, windy and you have the usual hunger, and then you think that if you really had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but suffering and tedium - as sometimes happens, when you really seem to lie on the bottom - well, even in that case, at any moment you want you could always go and touch the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself under the shunting trains, and then it would stop raining.”
― Primo Levi, If This Is a Man / The Truce

27 likes

“You're alive only once, as far as we know, and what could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn't lived it?”
― Edward Albee

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