Frankenstein – a review

The wonderful Caitlyn from Mad Cheshire Rabbit gifted me this book earlier on this year. Purely to force me to read it because she knew I wouldn’t until I had a physical copy in my hands! 😂 This book, as many know, follows a man named Frankenstein who aims to create life artificially and succeeds. In pop culture this is shown as a big, green, monster who he eventually manages to bring to life. And then who causes destruction. But how accurate is this?

Not at bloody all is the answer. When I heard this being described as gothic and with the pop culture references (although to be fair I’ve never seen an “adaptation”) I was expecting the crux of this to be the creation of the monster itself and the immediate struggle afterwards. I found a much different novel instead. The creation of the creature actually happens much earlier on in the book. It’s not the crux point at all.

This was a really big surprise for me, but we then got to discuss the concepts of life. Of exclusion and of treating fellow man the way we would wish to be treated. There are discussions of life and death, and so many unique and interesting topics! I wasn’t expecting philosophy!

But what I really had not been expecting? Was to love this book. I was reading this purely because it’s Caitlyn’s favourite. That was the only reason. But I adored this. It was such a lovely read. I adored all of the topics which Shelley brought up within the text as well as the main plot of the book itself. It’s a wonderful book and I can totally understand why it has lasted the decades (and centuries!) after its publication.

One point I would like to make is that I found the ending of the book very predictable, despite it feeling like it was supposed to be a twist. However, most likely this is because the book was published in EIGHTEEN EIGHTEEN and so at the time this probably was a twist!!

Highlight here for trigger warnings: attempted murder, child death, death, depression, islamophobia, murder, parental abandonment, xenophobia

For my CAWPILE ratings I gave:

Characters: 9

Atmosphere: 8

Writing: 6

Plot: 7

Intrigue: 8

Logic: 5

Enjoyment: 7

For an overall rating of 7.14 which comes out at a 4*! I’m so glad that Caitlyn gave me the push needed to pick this one up and I might have to read more from Shelley in the future!

How I Track My Reading

How do you track your reading? With being online we like to compare stats with other people: have you read this? how many pages? how many books? and so a lot of us will use some sort of tracking method for our reading.

For me, I started tracking as a way to be accountable to myself. If I was tracking how many pages I read in a day then the fact that I was or wasn’t reading was staring me in the face. After a long period of not reading this was something that really got me back into the habit of it. It also lets me see how my reading interacts with my daily life, whether I read more or less on weekends etc. It’s just handy! And one thing I have found it that after tracking this for a few years, it’s meant that I’m getting pretty good with my tbr’s. For the whole of 2021 so far (touch wood) I’ve been able to read all the books on my tbr! No complaints from me!

I don’t just track my pages per day though. I’m a little obsessed with stats! I have quite a bad memory for things like…my own activities 😂 and so I like to track everything possible to do with my reading so that I can have a good overall picture and not forget about things!!

I track the genre’s that I read, the age range I’m reading in, the number of pages each day but also the length of the books that I’m picking up and how many of them I’m reading each month. I track information about the authors, their nationality, their native language, and their gender identity. All of this lets me build up a picture of what I’m truly reading. Before I looked at the stats I’d assumed I was reading a load of YA books, but I’m not! Adult is actually my most read age bracket which was such a surprise! It creeped up on me without me noticing!

All in all, I have my bullet journal, I have my Instagram where I use templates to track my reading each month in my stories as well as posting stories each time I finish a book. I used Goodreads as well (I’ve been resisting moving to StoryGraph cause I’m lazy, can’t lie), and I also use 2 different excel spreadsheets!! I’ve been using Sophie from Portal in the Pages’ spreadsheet for a few years now and it’s absolutely fantastic, it tracks so many metrics and she has it all set up so that you just input the information and graphs and stats are calculated! And I also use G from Book Roast’s CAWPILE spreadsheet for my ratings. This one is newer, I’ve only started from this year, and it has really helped in making my ratings across fiction books more accurate and reliable, as you rate different sections of the book (characters, atmosphere, enjoyment etc) out of 10 and a score is calculated for you at the end.

I admit all of this may be a little over the top, but I like it! It really gives me a complete picture of my reading!! And I have to be honest… I do more than this too!! But that’s not really tracking my reading specifically and this post was already long enough!!

Do you track your reading at all? Do you track as much as I do? Let me know!!