Picture Frankenstein's monster. You are picturing a tall green man with a flat head, neck bolts, and a grunt for a vocabulary, lurching forward with his arms out. That creature is wonderful and it is also entirely an invention of the 1931 Universal film and Boris Karloff's makeup. The creature in Mary Shelley's actual book is almost the opposite. He is fast, he is graceful, and he is the best read character in the novel by a wide margin.
The monster talks. Constantly.
The thing people forget is that the creature narrates a large stretch of the book himself, in the first person, in long and rather beautiful paragraphs. He does not grunt. He makes speeches. He argues philosophy with the man who made him, lays out a careful case for why he turned out the way he did, and generally speaks with more control and more self-awareness than Victor Frankenstein, who spends most of the novel fainting, weeping, or developing a convenient fever to avoid dealing with anything. If you put the two of them in a debate, the monster wins, and it is not close.
How he learned all this
The education happens through a wall. The creature hides in a hovel attached to a cottage and watches a poor family, the De Laceys, through a chink. He learns to speak by listening to them. He learns to read because one of them is being taught to read at the same time, so he follows along from the other side of the wall like the world's most patient eavesdropper.
Then he finds a lost satchel in the woods with three books in it, and the three books are not chosen at random. Plutarch's Lives, which gives him history and a sense of what a noble life is supposed to look like. Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, which gives him feelings and despair. And Paradise Lost, which he reads as true history, and which wrecks him, because he works out that he is neither Adam, who was loved by his creator, nor quite Satan, who at least had companions. He is a third thing with no category, and he notices this himself, in the text, more clearly than anyone else in the book notices anything. A creature stitched together from parts has read Milton and drawn the correct and devastating conclusion about his own situation. That is the actual story.
Other things the films quietly reversed
He has no name. People call the monster "Frankenstein," but Frankenstein is the surname of Victor, the student who builds him. The creature is referred to as the creature, the wretch, the demon, the being. The book makes a point of his namelessness. It is part of why he is so angry.
He is a vegetarian. He says it plainly. He will not eat animals; acorns and berries are enough for him, and he frames it as part of being gentler than the people who hate him on sight.
He is athletic. He does not lurch. He outruns Victor across a glacier and bounds up the side of Mont Blanc. He is built to be faster and stronger than a person, which the films traded away for the famous stiff-armed shuffle.
And there is no lightning. The single most iconic image, the storm, the crackling apparatus, the cry that it is alive, is not in the book. Shelley is deliberately and almost teasingly vague about how the thing is animated. Victor refuses to explain his method so that no one else can repeat it. The electricity is the movie's idea. The novel keeps the secret on purpose.
The fortnight it came out of
The origin is as good as the book. In the summer of 1816 a teenager named Mary Godwin, not yet Mary Shelley, was staying by Lake Geneva with Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Byron's doctor John Polidori. It was the Year Without a Summer. A volcano, Tambora, had erupted in Indonesia the year before and thrown enough ash into the sky to dim the sun across the planet, so the weather that summer was cold, dark, and relentlessly wet. Stuck indoors, Byron proposed that everyone write a ghost story.
An eighteen year old won the contest so completely that we still talk about it. And the same soggy fortnight produced one more thing: Polidori, working from a fragment Byron abandoned, wrote The Vampyre, the story that turns the folk creature into the suave aristocratic vampire every later version descends from. One bad-weather house party, no sun, two bored geniuses and two more people who turned out to matter more, and out of it came both the modern monster and the modern vampire. The weather did that.
The longer shelf
Storica's Frankenstein sits at B2, which is roughly the level where the creature's own speeches start to land the way Shelley wrote them, as argument rather than groaning. If a made thing that talks back to its maker is the part that grabs you, Pinocchio at A1 is the same idea with the horror swapped for mischief, and it is darker than the Disney memory in its own right. Read either one in the language you are learning and the eavesdropping-through-a-wall trick stops being a plot device and starts being a fairly good description of how you are learning the language too.
I build Storica, a daily reading club for the language you're learning. We adapt the classics, the real ones rather than the cartoon of them, into short daily readings of about fifteen minutes, from A0 up to B2, in seven languages.