Started seeing this fella and while on our first date he mentioned the idea of a book club. I offered to join him because I’ve never participated in one. To be 100% honest, the idea of a book club with this fella was, as you can guess, mostly a reason to see him on a regular basis, and a way of getting to know him outside a sexual or romantic context. Funny, during our last book club he said: “This is really not just about the book.” It can be a challenge because gay men do, generally, become very sexual very quickly.
Neither of us had read Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.
Not even high school did I crack open that book.
I think it was funny how this fella was skeptical at first. I showed him though. Here we are, three weeks later and I’m still there, every Monday afternoon.
We aren’t quite through the entire story yet so I don’t have an idea of what ends up happening. All I know is that movies did not prepare me for what I was reading.
We all know that there are times when the book edges out the movie. Most of the time “the book is better”. In reality the movie and book only have slight variations. After about 180 pages of Shelly’s Frankenstein, I see little resemblance in movies, thematically and in character portrayal. According to Wikipedia, there have been just over 50 film adaptations of this story.
We’ve all seen the green, towering creation of the mad Victor Frankenstein. I didn’t see those characters in the book. Sure Victor has that streak of obsession, but not as manic as the films suggest. Well, Shelly downplays how manic it is. She also only gives snippets of the Creature’s appearance and no detail as to HOW Frankenstein was even put together. You know what the lack of details tell me? That this is a story more about ideas than events. Maybe that is a difference between classic literature and modern?
In our modern world, where attention is pried and pulled by so many options, stories, like other mediums, need to adapt to the audience….to an extent.
Every film version, I feel, has focused on themes like Man vs Nature, Marginalization even. To me, Frankenstein always was touted as this story about man being the worst monster (one of my least favorite tropes). As true as it may be, I always feel the enemy you don’t know (something paranormal, for example) is far more terrifying.
I’m looking forward to finding out how the story progresses and what new ideas I can uncover. This book club thing is fascinating because it isn’t just “what happened this week” but diving in-between the lines and finding out how to connect this story to our, “my” fella and my own, lives. If you haven’t already tried it, get yourself into a book club.
And fingers crossed me and this fella get into more than just books together. Ha!
Writeous Ink 