Mary Shelley - Frankenstein (1818). First time reading, and it was pretty damn good actually still in 2023. Sure the dialogue is far from natural, but it was the Victorian times so anything natural didn’t come to it anyway.
I did have a small chuckle for how the creature learned to talk and read. He hid under a house in Germany for a winter and listened to the people there, who in the spring just happened to teach the language to a Turkish woman. As for reading someone had chucked some books in the forest from which he learned a lot, Paradise Lost among them. So he spoke like someone out of Shakespeare.
Guillermo Del Toro is doing a new movie adaptation next year for Netflix. Frankenstein is his favorite book of all time so he might make the most faithful adaptation yet.
