Fernando recommends Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus (Restless Books):

Out of the canonical monsters, could the monster in Frankenstein be the most relatable? Who doesn’t sometimes feel like an amalgam of rotting appendages that have to be animated back to life with electricity?

I confess that I’ve never actually read Frankenstein. Who has? It turns 200 this year, and I don’t know of another book written by a teenager that has had this big of a cultural impact on our collective imagination. For this reason alone I should’ve already read it!

This edition released by Restless Books is the one for me, though. It has original, gothically radiant artwork by the artist Eko, and reproduces the original text of 1818, not the later, compromised text. The book feels great in your hand and makes for a great collector’s item, or if you’re looking for something beyond a regular paperback (which I hear mostly feature the to-be-avoided 1831 edition).

This is it, everybody: the year we all read this book and meet the monster firsthand. We shall embrace the epistolary narrative and its nineteenth-century-isms. We shall remember that one day our own Mount Tambora will erupt, summer will be gone, and perhaps a new monster will appear when the sun seeps through the clouds of ash.