During vacation this summer we visited a used bookstore in PEI. My son found Frankenstein and asked if I could read it to him. This melted my heart, the fact that my son picked a book with no pictures and wanted me to read it to him made me feel like I might actually being doing something right, raising a future reader.
I read it to my son but the vocabulary and more old-timey complex sentence structures were too much for him at his age. He was very patient though and lasted about the first 30 pages before exclaiming “Dad, I don’t understand what is going on!!”. Oh well, now we have a copy for when he is older.
A month later I picked up the book and read it myself just in time for Halloween. I found the structure of the book most interesting. The narration is essentially Walton -> Frankenstein -> the Monster -> Frankentein -> Walton. A story within a story within a story, or a valley that you climb down and then climb out of.