We're all the same species. We effectively evolved the same baseline for survival. The same driving forces, the same fears, the same fight/flight/freeze response to danger.

The only thing that varies are the outside forces that act on us like culture and environment.

And which of those do you imagine is excuse enough for a premeditated murder spree?

Back in the real world we'd laugh at anyone using something like that as an excuse for carefully planning and executing a series of murders for clear personal gain.

Frankenstein ran out on him and came back to nothing. No sane person would argue that's cause to go on a murder spree.

Along the same lines. he creature had very little contact with people other than his creepy stalking of the blind girl before he decided that murder and intimidation was the way to go.

The creature made a speed run to deciding that killing Frankenstein's loved ones, framing him for the murders and threatening to do more. These weren't crimes of passions, these weren't the creature lashing out at his tormenters.

The monster made a very cold calculation to target very specific innocent people for very specific self serving reasons.

Nothing that happened the creature is a valid excuse or even motivation for what it did. It explicitly did not harm its tormentors. It harmed innocent people in a way it hoped would benefit its goals.

Frankenstein is guilty of a lot of things but his creation's murders is not one of them. Yes, the way he treats the creature is atrocious.

But the creature murders out of carefully planned selfishness. It shows itself to be intelligent and reasoning and the line of reasoning it chooses to follow is that it can use intimidation, torment and murder to force Frankenstein into creating a companion for it.

The creature's killings aren't the result of a lack of self control or lashing out in a moment of insanity. The creature calculatedly chooses to murder carefully selected targets designed to force Frankenstein into doing its bidding.

I'd plead innocence on the basis that nothing Frankenstein has done causes the creatures cold, cruel, calculating plotting nature. If the creature had randomly lashed out, maybe. But there's nothing random about its actions.

The creature didn't turn into an amoral monster that doesn't know any better due to Frankenstein's neglect. It knows exactly what it's doing and chooses its course of action for maximum effect on Frankenstein.

Frankenstein's careless creation of the monster is an entirely unrelated crime to the monster's rampage.

>Were people really so horrible back then?

Short answer: yes. Children were historically fairly disposable. Without vaccines and proper healthcare, every family rich or poor dealt with child mortality. Generally disease and living conditions were a primary cause of death for everyone in the big cities at the time.

Between a lack of birth control and a penchant for literally producing spare children, a lot of families ended up with a surplus of kids.

Combine that with the industrial revolution making work scarce and labour cheap and kids turn into quite a burden. Money, food and living space is tight but you still have a gaggle of kids that you need to keep alive.

So when parents die, as they will working dangerous jobs and living in shitty conditions, you end up with a whole lot of orphans.

Kids in general were put to work simply to contribute to their survival. But orphans in particular were essentially just disposable. Chimney sweepers, for example, would buy orphans because they fit through narrow chimneys. It was expected that most of them would die on the job long before they'd grow too big to do it. You'd just buy more orphans.

It wasn't slavery perse. They would just pay the orphanage a fee for getting them the most useful kids. And the kids were welcome to leave and starve or get killed thieving or prostituting themselves instead if they thought that was an easier life. Most didn't think so.

And yeah, those same kids ended up in organised crime as thieves, pickpockets, prostitutes and so on. The alternative was the workhouses where they were just put to work on whatever people were willing to hire a gang of children for. Workhouses generally meant abuse, hunger, beatings and other mistreatment as the adults basically just monetised the kids any way they could.

It was a time where the standard of living was pretty terrible in general. If you asked the adults of the time, they weren't being horrible to children. They were providing children with a way to survive.

People tend to be as kind and generous as conditions allow. And Victorian England was not an easy time for much of the population.

In my day to day reading, not so much. But my very favourite books I tend to collect in fine editions. Things like leather bound Franklin library editions, Folio Society and such.

One of my favourite books in my collection is a lovely Franklin library edition of Poe's stories. Red leather, a gold inlaid geometric pattern on the cover, heavy paper and every story has an ink illustration. I love reading that book on stormy autumn days, sometimes just stopping to picture the stories while running my fingers over the leather.

One of my biggest splurge purchases recently is a folio society edition of the never ending story that is made exactly as the book itself is described in the story. The shimmering golden silk cover, the depiction of the Auryn. The only difference is that the book has beautiful illustrations while the book described in the story does not.

It's a joy just turning those thick pages. Stuff like this just turns the whole act of reading into an experience for me.

A scifi sociopolitical slow burn with a culturally sensitive topic sounds like money down the drain for a studio.

A lot of what he writes is more interesting as a metaphor for the war than as a straight up romance plot.

It's hard to say much without spoiling the book for you. But the great war... it destroyed people. It marked a turning point in how the world thought. Before, we were still traditional enough that men signed up for war, sometimes entire neighbourhoods or factory crews at once thinking they were going to bring honour to their countries and fight with chivalry.

Nobody could have imagined the meat grinder of WWI. It wasn't just that a lot of people died. So many people died and so many returned as physically and mentally mangled wrecks that our entire society was faced with the lie of how we saw ourselves.

This wasn't noble or chivalrous or defensible in any way. WWI was the industrialised slaughter of entire generations. The world would never be the same.

And that disillusionment is what you see in Henry. He displays self-destructive and self-sabotaging behaviour throughout the novel as he fumbles with his love interest as he weighs the merits of the war against the alternatives. A farewell to arms has a very double meaning. The weapons soldiers arm themselves with, or the arms of lovers they say goodbye too.

You haven't read the rest of the book. But Hemingway is a writer who usually tries to do most of his storytelling in the things he intentionally leaves unsaid.

The problem is that the more time passes, the more removed we are from the experiences that fuel his novels. So his meaningful silences become less meaningful as his readers no longer automatically fill in the blanks or grasp the metaphors.

Hemingway is one of those writers whose work is just ageing out of relevancy. He relies a lot on context that people no longer have.

World War 1 was such a world changing conflict that it's hard to imagine now. Not just the violence itself but the way it changed how people looked at the world.

This book is very much Hemingway trying to make sense of his own experiences of the Italian front and he'd be the first to admit that he struggled turning it into a coherent story. He wrote dozens of endings for the book and wasn't happy with any of them.

Scifi, fantasy, mythology, art and history makes up the majority of it. Maybe a few hundred these days.

A while back I made the decision to read everything I'd only read once on paperback. And everything I re-read periodically I collect in very nice cloth or leather bound editions. Stuff like this. I'd just started packing the 'library' here.

I got four doors worth of shelves like that and any time it's full, I take a look at what I'll get rid of to make space for something new. Usually it's the art books that get it as they're the least read and most replaceable. With some exceptions.

I get that completely. It's just that Johnny is an insufferable character. His arc is not just uninteresting, it's so grating that it feels designed to get you to toss the book in a fire.

So it doesn't serve it's purpose at all. It's not a pacing device. It's a killing device. It killed any interest I had in the book.

And even without Johnny, the Navidson records didn't go anywhere. It just sort of set up an interesting premise and left it largely unresolved. Leaving the book with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Tons of potential, entirely unrealised.

House of leaves. Never have I seen so much unrealised potential. The house is fascinating and by extension the Navidson records but I couldn't give a toss about Johnny, his mom or anything else the book did besides the house.

I have never read a book with more completely unrealised potential.

The books resulted in a billion dollar merchandise and media industry exactly because the stories were quite popular already.

So underrated that it resulted in a whole bunch of games and tv series while making the writer very wealthy indeed and growing the game studio into a billion dollar business.

>Is anyone else experiencing this? If so, why does this happen?

Because times have changed. A lot of older books were written for people who lived slower lives. For a lot of them, books were the only look at the greater world they got. So far more time was spend on explanations, descriptions of people, objects, locations and so on.

People today are use to being a high speed information sponge that never turns off. You'd bore them with descriptions like that.

Along the same lines, a lot of 19th and early 20th century novels were written as serialised content for magazines. The writers intentionally padded it to keep their pay check going.

Actually bothering to read things. It's amazing how big an advantage it is over many of your peers if you actually bother to read instructions, manuals, relevant news, briefings and so on.

A lot of people simply don't.