I recall trying to read the original Dracula once (my mom highly recommended it to me; I guess it had a huge influence on her in college). But I just couldn’t get into it at all. I suspect it’d be the same with Frankenstein. Just because something was very influential and started off the genre does not mean that it’s particularly good by today’s standards. It makes sense to read it from a literary analytical perspective (tracing its influences on later literature and such), but just as just-for-fun reading, not so much.

The thing that pissed me off, though, was a scene that horribly mangled Geneva’s geography. It was analogous to “I was in Rockville that night, when a thunderstorm arose. A flash of lightning revealed the monster standing on the other side of the street from me. I was blinded and lost track of him, but the next flash showed him climbing the Washington monument.”