Frankenstein

What an interesting read! Nothing like I was expecting after watching parts of the movies.

What I liked about Frankenstein. Three things I thought were interesting:

1. Frankenstein's story was about virtue and vice. 
Have you ever heard that Frankenstein is about moral development? About virtue? Anyone, Beuler...Beuler...

Well it is!

Shelly takes us from Frankenstein's innocence after being created where he knew nothing of humanity into a world where Frankenstein learned about virtue and vice from a small family he observed while hiding from them, but still be able to observe them. Listening to their conversations, Frankenstein learned about vice and virtue:

"I learned to, from the views of social life which it developed, to admire their virtues, and to deprecate the vices of mankind."

"I felt the greatest ardour for virtue rise within me, and abhorrence for vice."

"But I was the slave, not the master, of an impulse, which I detested, yet could not disobey." 

"Evil thence forth became my good." 

Much of the story is the personal struggle the monster had with his creator and which path, virtue or vice, the monster should take.

"My person was hideous, and my stature gigantic: what does this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I wasn't able to solve them."

He found himself in a world that he didn't understand, but over time, he learned about living a good life and living a bad one, but through his struggles to be good, he could never overcome being a monster, and people treated him as such, and so he wanted vengeance. He wanted vengeance upon his creator and humanity. And after killing several of Victor Frankenstein's family members, and making Victor follow him to the ends of the earth, he finally lamented his bad deeds after Victor died trying to kill the monster:

"When I first sought it, it was the love of virtue, the feelings of happiness and affection with which my whole being overflowed, that I wish to be participated. But now, that virtue has become to me a shadow, and that happiness and affection are turned into bitter and loathing despair."

2. Frankenstein teaches us natural education (the natural state of humans beings before creating civilization)
The similarity of Frankenstein's experience to life is similar to our own. He awoke into his life, barely being able to experience the difference in forms with his own eyes. He learned about eating nuts and berries from the earth, about the warmth of fire and how it burns wood, which he learned to do, and he learned that sounds humans make correspond to natural things in his world, like the word fire for the light that comes when wood burns, the word rain for the drops of wet liquid that fall on his face, etc.

After this rudimentary education, he learned about virtue and vice, about history and the civilizations of man, and about human nature. Shelly takes the reader from the earliest memories of humanities own consciousness coming out of the wild forests and leads the reader up to the present time. Besides Robinson Crusoe, it's one of the best books on natural education I've read.

3. Avoid Blind Ambition 
Victor Frankenstein was a brilliant man that was obsessed with an idea of bringing dead things to life, or giving life to a dead thing, the monster. The life lesson of Victor Frankenstein is about not letting blind ambition ruin your life.

"If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for the simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, than that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind."

In the end, all of the people Victor cared about were killed by his own obsession, not actually, but causally via his monster that he created. On Frankenstein's deathbed, he said this:

"Seek happiness in tranquility, and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries."

It was a tremendous book. I was astounded to read the monster speak back to his creator, and to do so with such eloquence. I definitely recommend you read it, dear reader.