Tag Archives: h.g. wells

Goodreads | Peter Anargirou’s 2013 Year in Books

Goodreads | 2013 Year in Books.

I read 32 books last year according to Goodreads. Boy, a lot of it was crap.

Six books were for teens – Ally Condie’s Matched trilogy, the last two novels of Marie Lu’s Legend trilogy, and a novelization from Surviving High School (the iOS visual novel I play a lot) by M. Doty, How to Be a Star.

Thirteen were actually episodic releases of John Scalzi’s The Human Division. It was later released as one novel.

Four were short stories (and most weren’t great) – The Time Traveler’s Wife, Skinny Bitch, Dead(ish), and I Will Be Your Dominatrix.

Two were based on World of Warcraft – Vol’jin: Shadows of the Horde and Stormrage.

The other eight were more substantial – The Ocean at the End of the Lane, John Dies at the End, This Book Is Full of Spiders, The Time Machine and the Invisible Man, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Journey to the Center of the Earth.

I’d talk about which ones I liked, but honestly, I really enjoyed a lot of them. It was nice to see John Scalzi return to his Old Man’s War universe with the Human Division, and I really liked the episodic release. John Dies at the End and its sequel, This Books Is Full of Spiders were both fun. I really loved Kafka’s stories, as weird as they were. And what can I say? I’m a sucker for teenager dystopian novels.

The Invisible Man

It took me over a month to read H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, mostly thanks to Scalzi’s The Human Division. I was familiar with the basic idea – a man becomes invisible and becomes a murderer. Through watching the story of Griffin, the Invisible Man, unfold and hearing him recount his earlier actions, the reader gets to see how he was driven to madness. However, it still seemed to happen too rapidly.

I would have liked to understand it a bit better. As terrible as it sounds, I wanted to feel like I could understand how one would end up doing the things he did. While I learned why he felt that way, I didn’t truly get to experience it. It also makes me wonder whether Griffin was unstable before his adventure even began or whether the disconnect between an invisible man and the rest of humanity naturally would create these feelings and tendencies in the invisible man. I suspect, due to Griffin’s early actions before becoming invisible himself, that he had inherent issues, but it’s interesting to ponder.

The Time Machine

I decided to reread The Time Machine recently because I hadn’t read it since high school. I finished it yesterday, and I was very impressed with the novella. Most people probably already accept the fact that it’s a classic, so I don’t think I need to discuss its merits here.

However, I particularly like some of H.G. Wells’ notions on time travel that I forgot. For example, one of the time traveler’s guests remarks that if the machine simply travels along the fourth-axis, time, faster (or in reverse), shouldn’t they still see the machine sitting there? The time traveler responds that just a fast moving thing barely makes an impression because it moves through your vision too quickly, a time machine traveling through time doesn’t make a deep enough impression on three dimensions to be seen.

In addition, Wells makes some interesting observations about class structure in societies and human progress. What’s our goal? Can we go too far? I don’t have answers, but they’re good questions to ponder.