The Beauty of Creation

Nathaniel Hawthorne -  The Artist of the Beautiful
★★★★★★★★☆☆

                All of Hawthorne's and Poe's short stories but one have death as one of the main motifs. The exception is Hawthorne's The Artist of the Beautiful. While the other stories talk about transience this one celebrates eternity.

The curse of ambition

Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
★★★★★★☆☆☆☆

                One of the most interesting things in Shelley's novel is a parallel she creates between Victor Frankenstein and his creation. Both of them are highly intelligent beings with a great thirst for knowledge as well as an extraordinary eloquence, moved by the beauty of nature and human kindness and led, at first, only by good and noble thoughts. They also both end up in misery, wanting for themselves nothing but the death of one another. The parallels point to a special connection between the two, similar to that between God and man. However, while God created (man) in his own image, Frankenstein hasn't, as the "daemon" laments: "...but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid from its very resemblance."

The simplicity of greatness

Lincoln
★★★★★★★★☆☆

                I don't know many details about Abraham Lincoln's presidency so I came into Lincoln unburdened by historical facts. There were some expectations though, considering the director is Steven Spielberg, and they ended up completely fulfilled. The film begins in the midst of the Civil War and follows Lincoln's attempt to bring an end to it, as well as to slavery, and the difficulties he faced doing it, ending with his death after the assassination at Ford's Theatre.

The blood is the life, but what good is a life without faith?

Bram Stoker - Dracula
★★★★★★☆☆☆☆

"I want you to believe."

"To believe what?"

"To believe in things that you cannot."

                Stoker's novel surprised me at first for, being written at the end of 19th century when all of the industrial and technological advancements made the idea of everlasting more possible than ever and everyone strove for a kind of immortality for themselves, it's unusual that it seems to battle the very notion of immortality in this world, marking it as a curse.

In the search for meaning

Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

★★★★★★★★★★

                Carroll's Alice stories are considered to be full of different meanings, but what I've noticed just now is how Carroll toys with the notion of meaning itself, both literal and hidden. Using words with multiple meanings (dry, miss) or those equally pronounced (tale/tail, flour/flower) Carroll shows how easy it can be to misunderstand, but he doesn't stop there. At one point the Duchess says to Alice: "Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.", indicating how the hidden meaning is ours to give regardless of that originally intended. Most works aim to deliver a message, but contrariwise, Alice stories only provide a reader with a framework in which to find one.