On Harry Potter

Harry Potter has always been one of my favorite book series. It is a book that I read very young and can continue to adventure back to. The originality and the world itself has always appealed to me, and in many ways so has the simple moral compass. I believe the way the book views morality is what makes it so well adapted to the minds of children. It is easy to understand who the 'good' and the 'bad' guys are, though it does leave some characters who are ambiguous throughout the plot. That element has always made me enjoy the book, the fact that characters like Snape and the Malfoy family are essentially characters that struggle with other matters that go beyond simple explainations like whether or not they are good or bad. They concentrate on love and fear, and fear is the element that I find most interesting in the Harry Potter novels. It is always in the background, and later in the books it is the foremost feeling one gets as they read, that everyone is in constant fear and anticipation of the battle that comes at the end of the seventh book, as well as the constant battle that rages throughout the series.

On Interview with a Vampire

 Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice was a wonderful experience. It seemed to bring to life and personalize the living nightmare that is the 'vampire'. The book was a fantastic and compelling read, and I found in no time at all I had finished and desired to move on to the next novel, 'The Vampire Lestat'.
The character I found that I enjoyed the most was Claudia. Her position in life and in relation to the other characters is interesting in that she never knows quite what to make of this relationship. A little girl, who died young enough to forget her exceedingly brief human childhood, became a vampire. All she knew was killing, though she did receive some guidance from Louis. i can relate to her level of uncertainty within her life, and the constant pursuance of knowledge. I enjoyed her character the most because I believe her life had the most struggle, and that since she was created, she was doomed.

On Zone One

Coleson Whitehead's Zone One is a zombie novel unlike any I have read before. Books on zombies, or zombie literature I suppose, have never really been my preferred horror sub-genre. I enjoy the existential dilemma that, as a rule, occurs in every zombie book and movie out there. The appeal of the zombie as a monster is that it reflects the monster within ourselves.
It was discussed in class that zombies reflect who we are afraid of becoming. We fear death, but more importantly, we fear stagnation. If we were to compare zombies to the living, breathing zombies found in our own daily lives, we find the juxtaposition easily recognizable. In other words, we see zombies, or lack of life, in our own routines. However, the horror of the zombie goes beyond the simple correlation between the live ones and the dead.
 When faced with the zombie, we are forced to make a choice. To see that zombie as the person they once were, or to see them as the walking dead. Or, in Mark Spitz case, one sees them as both of these things in one. The necessity to preserve life requires that zombies be exterminated. That simple fact can easily haunt the minds of the exterminators, as anyone could be among the ranks of the living dead. I find this particular aspect of zombies very interesting, in that no one can talk themselves out of admitting that they could become a zombie as well. Of course, when one imagines the zombie apocalypse, one always imagines oneself as the hero, or at least one of the surviving few. When we think of the horrors of such an existence, we think of ourselves as still existing, as being alive and willing to kill off those who are not. However, the coin flips both ways, and anyone can become a shell of what they once were, reduced to the basest of desires: the need to feed.

In this way I enjoy the premise of zombie movies and books, but Coleson Whitehead wasn't a favorite of mine. I felt that it took away the appeal of what made a zombie book in the first place: the struggle between life and death. The main character, Mark Spitz, reads as very bland to me. The author purposefully does this to allow the greatest number of people to be appealed to and be able to relate to the character. I like this aspect in the sense that it reflects the idea that everyone can be a zombie, even the living, though it made for a difficult and rather uneventful read. I always expected the character to have more life to him, to have some aspect that was his own that people cold still relate to, but I found none.
Nonetheless, I enjoyed the story simply because it was different from other zombie novels.

On Frankenstein

   

       Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was a novel created to generate questions. If we as people strive for self-cultivation, it is a necessity to fulfill the obligation of progress. Whether it be progress within ourselves or for others, one factor remains constant: incessant questioning. Opinions change according to the opinionated. When change does not occur, stagnation can only persist, and those creatures involved must partake in all of the consequences that should arise.
      The dominant question that one is faced with when reading of Frankenstein's exploits with his monster is the inquisition into the monster himself, or itself. What is a monster? What makes this creation of man a monster? Did he not come from man himself? This has always been an incredibly interesting question for me personally, because the very nature of the question generates a thousand more.
When it comes to the idea of a 'monster', or the disdainful nature of things, the only aspect of these manifestations that make them so repulsive and hateful is that they are only aspects of ourselves that we wish to deny, nothing more. Human nature is exactly that. There is no divine and no cursed, just as there is no black and no white. One would be hard-pressed to go out into nature and find something that does not contain both aspects of life and death. The most beautiful of trees still has bugs inside of it, rotting it from the inside out.
      And yet in Frankenstein we find what is essentially two antagonists. Frankenstein himself goes against nature to bring what is dead and inanimate back to the living, and once doing so cannot bring himself to the understanding and responsibility that the creature needs. By having only one opinion of things, to view life(and his monster), only as black, he ended his own life. The creature he created didn't kill him, he murdered himself when he murdered his understanding of humanity. Frankenstein sought to wrench the idea, even the memory, of his own creation from his mind. He could only understand one aspect of life, and in the monster's unfortunate case, it was only in the most shallow of aspects.
From my understanding of the book, there were two creatures, and only one possessed humanity. The monster was able to observe humans, and thus understand their nature. Unfortunately, it seemed that the monster only observed only those compassionate aspects of man at first. It is true that he was abandoned by his master and could not have the opportunity to observe him, but he very soon after discovered the family in the cottage. He saw only good and decency in them until he met with their wrath, and in turn responded directly to the environment.
      Frankenstein's monster isn't a monster, but he is also not human. He is a mirror. He reacts to the world around them, soaks in its information, and learns. He recreates himself constantly because he really has no other avenue. When he is shown kindness, always not directly, he responds with kindness and understanding. When he is shown wrath and anger, he responds in turn. On the days when the cottage people were sad, he mourned with them, and when they rejoiced, he celebrated. He was like that until the very end, and really had no sense of self within the book, other than that of his relationships, or lack thereof, with others and his outward appearance.
     As I mentioned before, the book was created to generate questions, and the discussion of such could be endless. Overall, I really enjoyed the theme that questions what the terms human and monster mean, as well as that of what is perceived as 'good' or 'evil'.