Welcome back lads and lasses. I will firstly thank all of the podcast listeners here for listening, it has been great to see the history series bobbing around in the iTunes history top 25, I hope that you are enjoying my humble audio series! Anyway lets have a look at some books. (Don’t worry I have learned to keep the reviews short!)

On This Day

    I have two books for you today, the first one is a simple history dictionary type. “On This Day” is not so much a written book as it is a diary of thousands of events from history. Each page is dedicated to one day of the year (obviously starting at January heading through to December!) On each page is a list of around 15 to 20 events that happened on that day of the year in history. To be honest that is all that can be said about it really! It is that simple.

    The reason that I mention this is that I really think that it is a great little collection. A single page is absolutely perfect to have a quick flick through in the morning or any time of day, I normally have a look at this book before I head out to work, it takes barely a few moments to read the events for the day and then I leave it until I read the next page on the next morning. I also would like to point out that this is where I get a lot of ideas to create a history podcast episode about. Thousands of events with a minimal explanation of a line or two, interesting reading for a few minutes a day and I see that there are very low prices on amazon!

Frankenstein (by Mary Shelley)

    Frankenstein is a classic, there is no doubt that it gave birth to one of the most widely recognised characters in literature. Even if he has been heavily edited, *cough* bolt through the neck! *cough.*

    I had always wanted to read Frankenstein to see what the story is actually about, I knew it must have been more than a green man running round roaring. After I had finished it I was amazed at what I had just read. This book is fascinating, don’t worry I won’t mention anything important to the story, I hate spoilers! To put it simply this book follows the fate of Dr Frankenstein as he creates new life and then learns that this is not the wonderful miracle that it should be.

    The story being around 240 pages long is not huge, but it still has enough time to investigate the surprisingly emotional events in the lives of Dr Frankenstein and his creation. I was genuinely surprised and, dare I say it, moved to hear the story unfold and learn the fate of the monster during it’s first years of life and the unfortunate things that happen to Frankenstein himself as a result of what he has done.

    It has to be said that when I started reading I never would have thought that it would have been such a genuinely good story, it is almost a shame that the character has become so popular and lost all of it’s original value as a thought provoking being. I really loved this book as it told me a genuinely sad tale in a way that even now is difficult to come by, using science fiction and yet almost not even being thought of sci-fi at all due to it’s focus on story and the way the monster is humanised before it ever comes into being.

    To attempt to sum up why you need to read this is very difficult, you will probably understand once you have read it, but until then allow me to try and explain: This book will make you think... And that’s it! It is something that I was completely unprepared for when reading the original story of a popular monster figure and yet I found myself thinking about the book at random times of the day, which to me is surely a sign of a good book!

    A surprisingly excellent story.

Thank you very much fro reading,

Come back on friday for some puppet fun!

Until then as always,

Look after yourself and have fun,

dan