Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson

I read the book after watching the excellent 1941 Spencer Tracy movie based on it and was surprised (although maybe I shouldn't have been) at the liberties Hollywood took with the text.  Neither the barmaid Ivy (Ingrid Bergman) nor Dr. Jekyll's fiancée Beatrice (Lana Turner) are in the book and they are major roles in the movie!

Instead, the book focuses on the observations of Dr. Jekyll's friends and servants about his mysterious and strangely repellent friend Mr. Hyde who is seen visiting his office frequently and at odd hours.  He does not seem like the type of person the morally upright and influential Dr. Jekyll would normally associate with, so there is a lot of speculation about him.  In the end, Dr. Jekyll confesses the truth in a letter to one of his friends.

I see the story as a lesson of what can happen when a person decides to give himself permission to occasionally indulge in something evil.  He thinks he is in control as he only gives in now and then, and he can keep it in a separate watertight compartment from the rest of his life.  But the indulgence becomes a habit and soon it controls him and takes over.

Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Frankenstein is one of those stories that everyone thinks they know because of so many allusions to it in popular culture, movies based on it, etc.  But the book turned out to be quite different.  It’s very much in the style of a Gothic novel with intertwined plots and subplots rather than the simple horror story I was expecting.

It turns out Frankenstein is not the name of the monster, but the surname of Victor the brilliant university student who created him, who does not at all fit the mad scientist stereotype.   The student, after years of hard work, succeeds in creating a rational being in his lab.  His problem stems from the fact that playing God in no way makes him God.  He does not have the deep love for his creature that God has and he does not have the foresight or the power to provide it with companions or an environment where it would fit in.   His contempt for his own creature and refusal to honor a promise to at least make a companion for it causes it to retaliate by killing its creator’s own loved ones.  By the end of the story, Victor Frankenstein is in futile pursuit of his creature, having resolved to destroy it so that it can do no more harm.

<i>Frankenstein</i> is basically a cautionary tale about the unpredictability of powerful new technologies:  they do not exist in a vacuum and they are not necessarily a force for good if their effects are not thought through.

Pierre, or The Ambiguities, by Herman Melville

The book started interestingly enough. Pierre Glendinning, the apple of his mother's eye and the beloved son of a well respected family, discovers that his father, whose character he thought was irreproachable, had an illegitimate daughter by a French refugee who mysteriously disappeared.  He meets this half-sister, Isabel (or she claims to be his half-sister), and, in order to ensure that she is taken care of gets part of his father's estate, he pretends to be married to her and alienates both his mother and fiancee.

After the point where he moves to the city and sets up housekeeping with his "wife" and a dishonored young woman named Delly from his village who has no place else to go, the storyline all went to hell pretty fast, going through all kinds of incoherent melodramatic twists and turns. I only finished the book because I figured I had already gone this far and there was a chance it might improve (this is <i>Melville</i>, the literary giant, after all), but it didn't.  I have since read somewhere that Melville may have written it to spite his publisher, who wanted him to produce more saleable conventional potboilers--so he deliberately made a mess of this one.

I gave it 2 stars because there are some beautiful passages in this book, but it was too weird for me. But then, Gothic novels in general aren't my thing anyway.  I read the <A HREF="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34970">Gutenberg ebook</A> of this title.

Defying Hitler, by Sebastian Haffner

If you ever wondered about how a highly educated, highly civilized country like Germany could fall under the power of a barbarian regime such as that of the Nazis, this is a very interesting book to read.  It is the memoir of a man who lived through World War I as a child and then through the transition from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich as a young lawyer and aspiring judge. He

He draws connections between his childhood experiences during World War I and how they instilled a peculiar outlook towards war in him and in others of his generation.  He writes of the surreal atmosphere and loosened morality that prevailed during the runaway inflation of the early 1920's and how the military training/political indoctrination camps young judicial candidates were required to attend before they could get their credentials helped make them more receptive to regimentation under the Nazis.

The book is well written and I couldn't put it down.  I finished it in one weekend and will probably be rereading it in the near future.