Frankenstein

So I read Frankenstein this week and I've got to admit that I am not very impressed with Mary Shelley's writing. The fact that she is the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft really gave me a lot of hope that her writing would actually be good but the unfortunate fact is that her writing just drags on and on. This wouldn't really be a problem if she used all of that unnecessary writing to try to prop up the actions (such as the creature's eloquent speech) with some sort of believable logic. I think the book would have been much better if the creature had first learned everything that Frankenstein knew and then decided through his dealings with humanity that he wanted to wipe human beings off the face of the earth via some awesome weapon. It would then be pretty cool if he created a Mrs. Creature and they struggled through the post-apocalyptic wasteland against the few surviving humans with the help of liberated barnyard creatures. Haha. That would be awesome!

Romanticism

I'm glad that we're studying Romanticism this week in my Brit Lit II class because I've just encountered a lot of Romantic literature in my World Lit class and I've yet to read any British Romanticism. It will be interesting to compare Tolstoy's work, which I am to begin this week, to that of the British Romantics. I'm pretty ignorant about Tolstoy, but I think that he was an opponent of Romanticism which is why I think it will be so cool.

On a side note, I really wish that there were some way to eliminate these unnecessary adjectives that I tend to use such as "interesting" and "cool!" It really bothers me that so much of our conversation is filled with these absurd modifiers! Every time I hear somebody remark, "oh that's interesting," I just want to scream, "Oh yeah? Well what's so damn interesting about it?!" But if I did that I'd be a hypocrite because I too am an abuser of the phrase and I can't stop! It's like we fill the air with that phrase just because, as Boron insists in Umberto Eco's "Baudolino" (I would have underlined that but I can't figure out how to do it in here!), of "the disgust that Nature would feel it it left a vacuum."