I second the Wrightson-illustrated verson. One of my favourite comic artists. 
Frankenstein is of course a deserved classic - like many, I found reading it a revelation, being already familiar with the lurching movie monster version.
Iftheresaway, that is going to be the first Octavia Butler id’ve read, its great to know someone really likes her! I’d heard good things on Goodreads about her novels. Its too bad she isn’t around to write more, it sucks especially badly when a beloved author dies.
I, too, recommend George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. It’s grittier and bloodier than Tolkien’s sagas, but matches them in terms of inventiveness and narrative sweep. It’s about an ancient kingdom wracked by civil war, with plenty of action, intrigue and double-crossing. And dragons!
As it happens, I just finished Tolkien’s The Children of Hurin, an elegant, spare retelling of the Oedipus myth set in the early days of Middle-earth. Good stuff. Another recent read of mine was Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine, about the contemporary Supreme Court. The book has a great mix of law, history, politics and gossip. Highly recommended (and on the NYT’s ten-best list of 2007).
I’ve been reading Mary Roach’s Bonk, about the science of sex, a little at a time over the last month or so. Can’t say I’ve found it engrossing.
I’m almost done with The Last Ditch by David Lampe and Gary Sheffield, about the Nazi invasion plans for Britain, and British preparations for an extensive resistance effort with widespread hideouts and weapons caches. Fascinating stuff. The Nazis had a long list of those they intended to arrest upon conquering the country, including Winston Churchill, Noel Coward and Sigmund Freud (who had indeed settled in Britain but died before the war - the list was a little outdated). Years later, having been on the list gave one a certain cachet, I guess. 
Thanks CM, I’ll search for that version. Sounds like it will be helpful. I’m finding myself skipping over wordy paragraphs because the text is somewhat difficult.
I’m already finding it a surprise read! I’m looking forward to finishing the book so I can compare it with the film. I love the film as a classic in and of itself but it seems the director took many artistic liberties.
I just started March, by Geraldine Brooks. It is a story about Mr. March, the father in Little Women, during the Civil War, with flashbacks to his youth, including the courtship and early days of marriage to Marmee.
So far, it seems like fan wankery, but I am a fan so I’m okay with that.
I just started The Years of Rice and Salt for my book club. The book looks at what would happen if 99% of Europe’s population was wiped out during the Black Death. Christianity is just a footnote in history, as Islam and Buddhism become the dominate schools of thought.
Last month’s book was The Great Mortality, so I’m definitely on a bubonic plague kick.
She won a Pulitzer for March. I really liked Year of Wonders but after reading some reviews that agree with you, I skipped March. Let us know if it gets better!
Literary awards are baffling, sometimes.
I liked both; especially, I thought that Year of Wonders is far better than World Without End, Ken Follett’s sequel to Pillars of the Earth, which has a similar theme. And I loved Pillars of the Earth.
This month I’ve got going a couple going.
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Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America’s Soul - a really fascinating look at the red light district of Chicago in the years following the World’s Fair. It’s made an interesting companion to The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America.
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The next in a series a friend call “Vampire Porn”, The Last of the Red Hot Vampires . I enjoy Katie MacAlister’s style - really breezy, strong female characters but her insistence on true love at first sight has started to get wearing.
I’ve got plenty to choose from once I finish these but I’m flighty about committing so my next book(s) are up in the air right now.
The Essential Frankenstein:
The Annotated Frankenstein:
His The Annotated Dracula and The Essential Dracula are pretty good (although David J. Skal, in Hollywood Gothic and his other books disagrees with many points). His The Essential Phantom of the Opera and The Essential Dr. Jeckyll and Mister Hyde are worth reading.
The Charlie Huston book was great. I’ve already ordered the rest of the trilogy. If you like Quentin Tarantino movies, you might like Huston.
As soon as they arrive in the mail, I’ll be reading:
Benighted, by Kit Whitfield, recommended by **jsgoddess **over on goodreads. Supposed to be an unusual book about werewolves.
Valor’s Trial, Tanya Huff
I ordered Magic Bites too, since last month people were saying they liked it.
Is World Without End about the Black Death? Dammit, I may have to read it after all. Everybody on the planet except me loves Pillars of the Earth, but while the story was very interesting, I didn’t care for the author’s writing style at all, and I had decided not to sit through another massive volume of it. But I do love a plague book.
Yes, it is. All plague, all the time. (Not really, but I thought I would give you hope.) But it is about the plague.
I’ve got about a chapter left of Hot Six by Janet Evanovich that I’ll probably finish tonight. And I’ve got Seven Up waiting in the wings. I like these books for summer and camping, sitting on the beach, etc. They are just so fluffy and fun and a whiz to read. And I like the little nuggets of New Jersey.
A friend just sent me The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine with a note saying he enjoyed it and thought I would as well, so I will dig into that tonight.
Then I’ve got Grape vs. Grain: A Historical, Technological, and Social Comparison of Wine and Beer to soak up after that.
Finished Empire of Ivory by Naomi Novik and Dzur by Steven Brust today.
I liked Benighted but it is pretty dark. I found it to be a lot more about a society’s mistreatment and exploitation of minorities than it was about werewolves.
Let me know what you think about Valor’s Trial.
I finished A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I liked it up until the huge deus ex machina at the end. I probably would have tolerated that better if I had been twelve when I first read it.
I would be happy to mail you the paperback if you would like to read it. It’s short, so even if you hated it, it’s a small investment of time.
Finished March. Similar to Year of Wonders, the parts of the book that “set the scene” are excellent – incredibly evocative writing about places, times, weather, moods. If you are even vaguely a fan of that kind of Civil War fiction (Ladies of the Club, Oldest Living Confederate Widow …, etc) you would probably enjoy those parts.
The courtship with Marmee was okay. The parts where he would imagine Meg or Jo sitting at home doing something Meg or Jo-ish were a bit obvious, I mean I could have managed to write about Meg going off to her day’s work as the nanny to the affluent King family. There’s a bit with Beth that is just stupid. Overall, the overlap with Little Women is wisely kept to a minimum.
Kind of a spoiler, depending on how particular you are, regarding the character of Mr. March (not any plot points):
In some ways, I think I liked it because it seemed to confirm what I personally always thought about Mr. March – that he’s a well-intentioned loser, basically. If you hold Mr. March in higher esteem, this might be disappointing. Or, it’s possible that this is a case of confirmation bias and I am cheerfully projecting my own image of Mr. March as a hapless, out-of-touch bumbler on to the text.
I enjoyed it right up until the ending, which I found pretty unsatisfying.
[spoiler]I never did like the gray alien plot. I dislike omnipotent, unfathomable aliens, the kind that are so far advanced that they’re practically gods. (Joe Haldeman, one of my favorite sci-fi writers, ended one of his series abruptly with this kind of alien as a deus ex machina, and I guess that soured me on the concept.)
And I didn’t like the fact that all of the marines left behind in the prison died. I figured we’d lose a few of the escape party, but for all the rest to die off-stage like that was kind of depressing. But if Huff wanted Torin to leave the Corps and sail off into the sunset with Ryder, killing off her entire company was about the only way to make that happen.
This felt like the last Valor book. So far she has always ended her series somewhere between 3 and 5 books.[/spoiler]
I finished Coraline and I liked it. So now I can come to a final decision on Gaiman: I like his horror and fantasy, but I hate his “alternate reality” stories.
I’m really liking A History of the Wife by Marilyn Yalom, too. I’m in the pioneer chapter now and it’s very hard to put down. I keep wanting to play Oregon Trail, though.