by Mary Shelley
Abandoned at page 209. I keep trying to come up with reasons to continue reading but can think of none. It's not what I expected and I'm just not enjoying it at all.
One word, in truth, had alarmed her more than battles or sieges, during which she trusted Raymond’s high command would exempt him from danger. That word, as yet it was not more to her, was PLAGUE. This enemy to the human race had begun early in June to raise its serpent-head on the shores of the Nil...
Being a lover of older books and science-fiction when I discover a book that is in effect both I become really interested, so when I discovered that Mary Shelley (of [book:Frankenstein] fame) wrote a book about the last man left alive on Earth (or as she puts it in her book the LAST MAN), I was imme...
For a while I hesitated if I should turn on the spoiler alert marker for this post. But then again, the plot is given away in the title, right? What surprises me, though, is that The Last Man is not more popular in this era of the post-apocalyptic, everybody-dies-of-something-or-other-in-the-nick-...
My fortunes have been, from the beginning, an exemplification of the power that mutability may possess over the varied tenor of man's life tl;dr version: More interesting as an artefact of early post-apocalyptic literature, and perhaps for the lightly hidden portraits of Shelley and Byron by some...
Looking at my review of Shelley's Frankenstein, I noted I had written that the "flowery, melodramatic style sometimes made me roll my eyes." But I also remember by and large enjoying that book, and being impressed by the play of ideas and imagination. Enough I had wanted to read this other book by S...
I spent a whopping six months finishing this (though there was approximately two or three months where it wasn't read at all, because of school), which is a horrendous slow reading pace for me. I went into the book expecting something akin to Frankenstein. In that regard, I was sadly disappointed. I...
Shelley needed an editor on this puppy. She had one on Frankenstein - Percy Bysshe Shelley - but he added 5,000 words to it, and (I hear) some of the more florid passages. Maybe she thought those worked, so she should write more. (Much of The Last Man is very, very florid indeed.) Or maybe she j...
This small press was at the Brooklyn Book Festival, and I'd always wanted to read this...
[These notes were made in 1981.:] I enjoyed this novel, but [my professor and eventual thesis supervisor:] Jay Macpherson's right - it can't really be called a Gothic, although the situation must have seemed sufficiently "improbable" to readers of the period. Although Mary has an irritating tendenc...
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