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"Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women."

- from Middle Passage

• Charles R. Johnson (April 23, 1948 - ), an African American author who has written many different types of writing, and addresses many issues that involve black lives within his writing.
• Published 1990
• This story is about a freed slave who escapes from being forced to marry a woman who was paying Rutherford Calhoun's creditor to have them marry. He stows away on a ship that is headed to Africa to capture members of the tribe known as Allmuseri. The captain claims to have also captured the tribe people's god, which is enforced when a boy goes down to feed it and returns insane. After a series of misfortunes, the crew plans a mutiny, but don't go through with it, due to the fact that the Allmuseri taking over before the mutiny can take place. Calhoun convinces them to keep some of the white men alive to take care of the ship, but the captain commits suicide and the first mate says that a storm messed up the constellations, so he can't steer the ship. Calhoun passes out for three days after visiting the "god," and wakes to find that the cook, himself, and only a few Allmuseri are left alive. Before their ship is completely destroyed, they're discovered by another ship, which rescues them. This ship just happens to have the woman who was paying to have Calhoun marry her, and the man who was in charge of that. She's now being forced to marry the creditor, Calhoun resolves internal conflicts, and Isadora winds up marrying Calhoun after all.
• Personally, this book doesn't sound that interesting to me. I know well enough to not judge a book by its cover, and reading the summary has provided enough information for me. It sounds like something that would be a high school required reading for a class, and it sounds very similar to nonfiction, which I would care not to read. I prefer fantasy and fiction, and though this book doesn't sound bad, it just doesn't sound appealing to me. 

"He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance."

- from Frankenstein 

• Mary Shelley (August 30, 1797 - February 1, 1851) was the daughter of two authors, and married another one. She had many other writings, and edited a lot of her husband's work, but is most famous for being the author of Frankenstein. 
• Published 1818
• Told from the viewpoint of Victor Frankenstein for the most part, it starts with his childhood and how he and his siblings were encouraged to learn. He took a liking to the sciences, and goes to school for chemistry, and is also where he learns to bring life to things that aren't alive. To make things easier to replicate, Victor makes his creature larger than the average man, but didn't account for how this would make the creature look, which resulted in Victor's horror and fleeing from the monster, and the monster's feeling of rejection. Victor returns to find that his brother has been murdered, and suspects his creation, but can't prove it to the townspeople to save the life of an innocent woman. Victor then retreats to the mountains, where his creature finds him and communicates with him that he learned to read and write, and, despite knowing his hideous complexion, approached the family anyway. They fled in fright, and he burned the cottage and murdered William. The creature then demands a female companion be made for him, as he had the right to happiness, and promised that the two would disappear to South America, never to be seen again. Victor agrees to make a female, but when he catches the monster spying on him, he destroys her. The monster confronts him, and promises to be with Victor on his wedding night. He then kills one of Victor's best friends and leaves the body to be found by Victor when he returned to Ireland. Victor has a mental breakdown in prison, and then returns to his father when he is acquitted. On his wedding night, he prepares to confront his creation, but is shocked to see that the monster has instead killed his bride-to-be. After the deaths of so many of his companions, Victor's father died. Grief-stricken, Victor chases the monster up to the North Pole, but doesn't kill his creation.
• I've supposedly already read this book, as I took AP English literature last semester, and this was the required reading. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to read it because of the difference in the language and how big and fancy some of the words and how complex some of the sentences were. I didn't like it at all for the parts that I did read, and found it rather boring and hard to keep up with. While the summary sounds interesting enough, the actual book isn't.