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Here is the book for you people to read this month. To my knowledge it is not too long so it shouldn't be too hard. Discuss it here and if you write a review of it be sure to post that in here too.

Have Fun!

Although my 17yo son told me the book was boring, I enjoyed it. I thought the last chapter was especially interesting.

There's a whole layer of underneath stuff going on in this book. (It was written when psychology and psychiatry were just emerging as a discipline.) Is Hyde really a separate being, or is he just who Jekyll really is? Is everybody a monster underneath?

People who enjoy graphic novels might be interested in the interpretation of Jekyll and Hyde in Alan Moore's THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN. (Be aware that these works are definitely R rated.)

I loved that movie, I have the book on hodlr ight now at the library and should have it in a day or so. I am super excited to read it as Dr. Jekyll is one of my favorit charters, along with Dorian Grey.

Alas, the movie is NOTHING like the graphic novel. Any more than any movie about Jekyll and Hyde is like the written work.

a decent into madness or a devistating drug addiction? i think it could go either way. this was an easy, entertaining read.

i wonder, was hyde an excuse for jekyll's bad behavior? was he trying to alleviate his guilt by blaming an imaginary being? even if jekyll started out believeing hyde to be real perhaps in the end he realized he was all one person and the guilt consumed him.

i also like how this months short story (yellow wallpaper) carries the theme of questionable sanity.

When I first finished it, I thought it was a basic story that wasn't too difficult to read and not overly done. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized how much is behind the story: the fight between good and evil in all of us and how we sometimes turn into our own worst nightmare when we don't even expect it or want it. It was a really good story that I would definitely read again :)

Stevenson, brought up with his Presbyterian father's strict scientific discipline and perhaps his more artistic mother's yearn for escape. R.L. liked the odd brothel and drinking den himself, didn't he? And maybe Hyde is his escape, and his own strong fear of its consequences. For me it is exactly that, the battle between good and evil that goes on inside all of us, and what happens if we allow the one to separate from the other. I love the book, but more, I love R.L's own life story - an amazing one. And it's conclusion: Home is the sailor, home from sea, and the hunter home from the hill....

Just in case some people don't know, (and I only found this out recently myself), "Jekyll" should be pronounced to rhyme with "treacle", not "freckle", as most people I've heard saying the name seem to think. That was the pronunciation used in Scotland (or in Stevenson's part of it) at the time.

Apparently Stevenson wrote the work in a white-hot burst of inspiration, over only a couple days or so.

In other words (hit send too soon) he wasn't thinking about this deeply or analyzing his story; he was writing it in a rush, from the backbrain.

Huh, that's interesting lol I would not have thought that :P

I've never read this book and I'm quite excited too! I've always meant to, just never got around to it. I haven't been able to start yet, but I'm going to in the next couple days :D

Just got it from th elibrry I hope to have it done in the next day or two. I read the first page in the car (no I was not driving :D) and am already struck by the language he uses and how long his sentances are.

I can not find this book in any library. Can any one send me a copy, please?

Nice to read some review from you guys :)

From reading this book, I get the lesson that everyone has a bad side. Maybe sometimes we want to eliminate the bad side of us and show the good side, but with so we don't honest to ourselves. Instead of separating between the good and bad, but accept what we are and strive to provide the best for all around us.

Is there any other movies tells about this story? Except The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen?

Well there is a musical, JEKYLL & HYDE, which was flawed on the plot side but has a great score. They created/enhanced a female character, one of the prostitutes in the seedy side of London, so as to get a female star in. You can sometimes catch it on tour -- it's going to be at the Kennedy Center (Washington DC) next year.

I won't be following this month's book. I'm on holidays now (finnaly), and i want to catch up with a few books i've been postponing reading due to my beloved classics. So - I'LL BE BACK... :)

Man I tried to find this book at my local library but they didn't have it. :(

Oh I am sorry you couldn't find it. It is really good. I forgot it while I was camping but I hope to finish it tomorrow.

I finally finished it, I do wel on deadlines :D

At first I thought the book was about the struggle to between good and evil and how everyone has a dark side but now I am wondering something. Maybe Jekyll was envious of Hyde because Hyde was so free. Souldn't all of us like to indulge in evil with no benafit? Jekyll at first said he did enjoy being Hyde but later was so appalled by what Hyde did he could no longer be him. So maybe it is about the fight to overcome our evil side and not indulge in whatever comes our way.

Anyways I really enjoyed it. I did notice however the Hyde was smaller and unglier than Jekyll where as in the move "League of Extrodanary Gentlmen" Hyde was way bigger. I think it is interesting that the movie decided to take that view.

It is clearer in the graphic novel LEAGUE, which is tons better than the rather weak movie. In the graphic novel, you can see that gradually Hyde gets bigger as poor Jekyll gets smaller and more feeble; eventually there is only Hyde and we don't even see Jekyll any more.

I like it better that way. The more you indulge in evil the bigger it gets and the harder it is to resist. Not that you cannot ever come back from it, It hink it funny that that Jekyll dies completely while Hyde lives. Even though Jakyll wanted to change and did indeed do so Hyde continued to take over.

Is it just me or did anyone else find this book a bit too long in some parts? I mean the book as a is not lengthy but certain parts of the book were just too hard for me to concentrate. The surprising thing is, even though I found the book a bit boring at times it still kept me hooked! A very peculiar combo :D Lesson to learn is that everyone has two sides but I think it is upto us(to choose according to what we want and our deeds) at the end to allow which one will reflect our personality.

I did feel like if I had skipped the whole book but the last two chapters I would have gotten about the same out of it, but I am glad I read the whole thing. I got lost once or twice in the language and it took me three or four tried to understand what the author was saying, and that of course lengthend the book for me. But I never lost interest in it.

I really liked this story, and was disappointed at how short it was. I would have liked to read more.

I read this for my Catch-Up Challenge and though it's quite late here (in the middle of the night, in fact), I wanted to get my thoughts down before I sleep:

* Interesting glimpse into the Victorian mindset - these notions of one's reputation warring with one's impulses

* Utterson was actually a more interesting character than I was expecting - it's quite tragic that he lost his two closest friends - another chapter of his thoughts on the events after he'd read Lanyon's and Jekyll's explanations would have been welcome

I read this for my Catch Up Challenge. It was an enjoyable short read. However, I felt the story went at a slow pace until near the end when a lot was revealed. I wish the pacing was more regular.

I also finished this for my 2017 Catch Up Challenge. I give it just a couple of stars. Here is my longer review:

1. I consider this story "quaint." I use that term because the description of Hyde as small, agile, aggressive, and somehow deformed (the term replaced later in the book with "ape-like") summons to my mind Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species." That is because Darwin made a strong scientific case for the evolution of humans from an ancestor shared with one of the great apes. So this was well known to the minds of the late Victorian era, and it was even "old news" or "quaint" to them. Religious scholars disputed it, of course, but biologists and most anthropologists accepted it easily. Of course, it would take the advances in genetic and DNA research (in the 1930's) to make the connection to an ancestor common to us and the chimpanzees. Nevertheless, the ape-like evil of Hyde was a perfect corollary to the moral human that was Jekyll, as a way to embrace the animal nature of our genes and yet somehow surpass it.

2. Jekyll intends to break free from the shackles of his "imperfect humanity," (meaning that genetic mess described by Darwin, above) and to improve himself morally, by creating a kind of body double that would bear the blame for the worst "ape-like" aspects he had. I think this was Stevenson's way to summon the discontent of many people with the materialism and other scientific limitations of late Victorian life. Dickens had already exposed some of those terrible social consequences in his own writings. What interests me is that Jekyll used an undefined "transcendental medicine" by chemistry to create this body double split. The severe, conventional scientist Lanyon disparages this so-called science as "unscientific balderdash" despite seeing the transformation from Hyde to Jekyll occur before his eyes. The story never makes the case for or against this "transcendental medicine" so we only see Lanyon's incredulous rejection of it at the end. I would only add that even in our own times we like to rely upon similar fantasies, such as out of body projection, which are just one more form of pseudo-science that no age is immune from.

3. Repression accounts for much of Jekyll's angst. Victorian England did not encourage sexual expression, violence or even expression of emotion. So the more Jekyll's forbidden appetites are repressed, the more he desires the life of Mr. Hyde. He ultimately wants a purely virtuous life, and that is clearly his motive in finding a way to completely escape from the "evil" part of his life. His motive is clear at the end, in his letter: "....it was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty. Jekyll was no worse; he woke again to his good qualities seemingly unimpaired; he would even make haste, where it was possible, to undo the evil done by Hyde. And thus his conscience slumbered....."

4. All the men in the novel are confirmed bachelors, being lawyers, doctors, men about town, and even a butler. All of them are confirmed purveyors of Victorian morality. But the women are few, and none are prominent. Even the girl in the beginning of Enfield's recount is a loud angry thing shouting for justice. And the maid who witnesses the death of Carew is passive and never given prominence. It seems that Stevenson is intent upon casting the few women as merely passive spectators. I cannot determine what this says, if anything, about the milieu of the story. Of course, other more famous stories with exactly the same milieu. I am thinking specifically of many stories in the Sherlock Holmes stories.

5. Is this story a parable for not trusting the chemistry of our lives? Jekyll says specifically that he loses control of the transformation process because "...I am now persuaded that my first supply was impure, and that it was that unknown impurity which lent efficacy to the draught." Since Stevenson was addicted in some measure to laudanum and other chemicals, he had a personal story to tell in this particular rendition.

6. With some resistance, I will call this story a kind of tragedy a bit in the Aristotelian sense, with a man plagued by flaws trying to surpass them and to do the right thing, and failing to do so while harming himself and many around him. This summary is a trifle trite to me, because there is as much melodrama, or just Gothic thriller, as anything else in this story. So I will just close this review as I started it, with the summary of "quaint."