Friday, November 12, 2010

written artwork - dr. jekyll & mr. hyde

Can anyone say "underwhelming?" Boy, for a book that has been talked about and made into movies so often, this thriller didn't exactly get me on the edge of my seat.

First off, I really could have used more back story to the characters. It really wasn't built up enough for me to feel the tragedy of the situation. You really have to love something before you can feel the pain of loss.

Second, I was truly expecting Mr. Hyde to be some diabolical genius who sabotaged the heroic efforts and gentleman like conduct of Dr. Jekyll. Wrong. Mr. Hyde was kind of like a grumpy old man with a cane, who one time beat someone with it and they happened to die.

My guess is that this book possibly would have been better had I not known the premise. There are some books that are still captivating even if you know the general plot before hand, and I was hoping this would be one of them. I guess it wasn't. My recommendation is to go see one of the many movies in a dark room and tell ghost stories afterward. Maybe, just maybe, then someone might get an enjoyable fright.

Photo Courtesy

A list of what's to come, and what has already been explored.

My Written Artwork Journey Explained here

  1. Animal Farm - George Orwell
  2. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
  3. Emma - Jane Austen
  4. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
  5. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - Tennessee Williams
  6. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
  7. Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
  8. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
  9. The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer
  10. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
  11. Nineteen Eighty-four - George Orwell
  12. Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller
  13. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
  14. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
  15. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
  16. Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
  17. Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens
  18. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
  19. The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
  20. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
  21. Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
  22. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
  23. Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
  24. The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
  25. Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
  26. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
  27. Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  28. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
  29. Little Woman - Louisa Ma Alcott
  30. Crime and Punishment - Fedor Dostoyevsky
  31. Watership Down - Richard Adams
  32. Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak
  33. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
  34. All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque
  35. Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
  36. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
  37. The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane
  38. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
  39. Tales - Edgar Allan Poe
  40. Diary of a Madman and Other Stories - Nikolai Gogol
  41. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
  42. A Farewell To Arms - Ernest Hemingway
  43. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

2 comments:

  1. I read this book for one of my English lit classes and I think the background you might have missed is that this epistolary novel, like Dracula, is a commentary on English society at the time. On the surface, the Victorians and Edwardians were proper and moral, but underneath it was one of the raunchiest and immoral times. Thus Mr. Hyde represents that 'perversion' of mankind.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi, Bethany!

    I was staring at this picture and having fun.. I love it!

    Missing you at my blog! :-)

    Take care,

    Luciane at HomeBunch.com

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for sharing your thoughts!