And October's Book is... Frankenstein!

We'll be reading Frankenstein by Mary Shelley for our October novel.

Hello!

I’m checking in today to let you know that October’s book, and the very first of the Classical Book Club, is going to be Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

If you need to purchase this book, I’ve got a few options below.

• In the UK, Amazon has a paperback version for £2.99 or the Kindle version for £0.75.

• In the USA, Amazon has a paperback version for $3.99 or the Kindle version for $0.99.

• As I’m UK based, I’m less familiar with other places to purchase in the US. In the UK, however, World or Books offers an alternative place to purchase the novel secondhand if you’d prefer not to use Amazon.

What’s Frankenstein about?

Taken from Goodreads, Frankenstein is, “A twisted, upside-down creation myth. Mary Shelley's chilling Gothic tale lays bare the dark side of science, and the horror within us all. It tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, who plunders graveyards to create a new being from the bodies of the dead - but whose botched creature causes nothing but murder and destruction. Written after a nightmare when its author was only eighteen, Frankenstein gave birth to the modern science fiction novel.”

Given there have been various reprints, the length of the novel can vary somewhat. Higher estimates have this book at about 250 pages, sometimes less, so it’s not a particularly long novel to get through.

Who was Mary Shelley?

Mary Shelley (1797-1851) published her most famous novel, Frankenstein, in 1818. During her life she wrote several other books, including Valperga (1823), The Last Man (1826), the autobiographical Lodore (1835) and the posthumously published Mathilde.

Shelley is often considered the mother of science fiction because of Frankenstein, though it is also be considered a gothic horror story (albeit it doesn’t follow modern horror tropes).

As part of the club I’ll be writing more about Mary Shelley for you to read in the next month. As one of the great Romantic era writers, she had a fascinating life and a huge impact on popular culture and modern literature.

What happens next, then?

I’m going to open up discussions about this book over a 48 hour period at the end of October, which should give everyone the opportunity to discuss the novel at some point. This will take place within the Substack chat function, so you’ll need to ensure you have a Substack account that you can use (easy to do, you don’t need to create a newsletter of your own).

I’m going to be writing an email each week which shares some of my thoughts (without spoiling any of the plot) and some help for how to read and digest the information. Frankenstein, while relatively short, uses some old fashioned language and is at least partly in an epistolary form (told through letters).

The idea behind this book club is that we read through classic novels together. But that’s not always easy to do, and they can make for challenging reads. My weekly posts will help you to engage and explore the classics in an accessible way. You might not need them, but for those of you who might find the classics slightly more challenging, I hope they’ll be of some help.

I’ll also explain more about how the discussion at the end of the month will work soon. I’m still working this out exactly, but I’ll have more details for you very soon.

If you have any ideas on how you’d like the discussion element of the book club to run, or anything you’d like included, I’m certainly open to hearing them! You can reply to this email, comment here or message me on Substack and we can chat.

So please do get cracking on this month’s read! I look forward to getting stuck into it and discussing it all with you at the end of the month.

Any questions, concerns or difficulty in reading this - please do get in touch. The idea is that we work through this together and make classical literature accessible to everyone.

Take care and I’ll speak to you again soon!