Ten Books Everyone Should Read

Intelligent, in want of love, but reviled for his appearance, the Gothic monster haunts us by remaining relevant to this day.

"Should" is such a dogmatic term, and I wonder if it might make a book less appealing (and not just for young readers) to be told it's a good book and you should read it ("Eat your broccoli, Johnny!"). However, I can say in all honesty that I consistently enjoy teaching Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein. A dare, on a dark and stormy night at Byron's castle among her wild Romantic-Gothic bohemian circle, prompted a very young Mary to write this tale, first published in 1818, of a scientist's attempt to create life, and the widespread tragic consequences of his irresponsibility. It has haunted literary and popular culture into the 21st century.

Frankenstein's creature does not have the iconic status of Dracula, though the latter has travelled as far from his literary origins as the good Count in popular culture; it can be quite surprising to see that the bolted-together, lumbering, pathetic, inarticulate figure immortalized by Boris Karloff's portrayal in James Whale's movie was in Mary Shelley's imagination still hideous (gigantic and disproportionate, with watery eyes and lank hair) and violent, but also intelligent and articulate, thirsty for knowledge and for love. The novel raises so many questions concerning class, education, gender, appearance, exploration, responsibility. Students are intrigued by (and often feel sorry for) the creature, but they are also fascinated with Victor, who is drawn to his life's work through his father's careless dismissal of his outdated philosophical interests and cornered into a marriage with a girl brought up as his sister, yet cruelly irresponsible concerning his creature's welfare.

But it's not just a novel that springs to mind in response to this question, because the book has an interesting hook and provides several things practically useful to the literary scholar. The reasons for my choice lie more in the way it persists in haunting us by remaining fresh and relevant. Despite its associations with horror, Frankenstein has always been generically closer to science/speculative fiction. Every tale of science boundaries defined and broken, of attempts to create life (mechanical or biological or both) outside conventional reproduction, owes something to Frankenstein, from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and its film version Blade Runner, to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go to the movie Splice.

Last year I asked a first-year class if they could think of any other example of the sort of multiple narratives the novel employs. One immediately cited the movie District 9, with its layers of news footage, corporate documentary, and "straight" cinematic narrative; another pointed out that, like Victor's creature, the stranded aliens seemed to be largely reviled because they're regarded as physically unattractive and they have unappealing habits. I'm always happy when students tell me they've seen District 9, but the association makes me think of an enduring "everyday" element of Frankenstein, even more basic than its concerns with limits of endeavour/enquiry: its concern with the way we construct and then embrace or reject the "other," based on really very superficial conventions of beauty.