The Reader Bookshelf is a carefully curated collection of literature for adults and children, exploring a different theme each year, this year’s theme ‘Wonder’ is about being bold, being curious and being open. Staff and volunteers around the country have selected 12 titles for adults which explore what 'Wonder' means to them.
We're delving into The Reader Bookshelf with a review of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley by Grace Frame our Practice Development Lead.
Frankenstein is a book that has engaged readers in many different Shared Reading groups over time, and it is interesting how group members have discovered lots of different kinds of entry points into it. There are certainly things about the book which you might expect would be a bit off-putting. There is some difficult, older language to get to grips with, and the book opens not with the main narrative which may be more familiar to us, but with another character who writes four letters that gradually introduce us to the story that is about to unfold. Then there is the content of the novel itself which asks us to imagine some terrifying events and to confront that meeting point where the stuff of imagination enters into reality. And yet despite these layers, readers find that when the text itself is shared with them, we are quickly drawn in.
We get to know people in this novel in different stages: you might like to think of it as getting to know the ‘creator’, Victor Frankenstein, first, and later getting to know the ‘creature’ whom he creates. But initially we are introduced to Victor through another traveller who encounters him as a ‘stranger’. This traveller, Robert Walton, is the writer of the four letters. A group that meets in a men’s prison engaged readily with the first two of these letters. One member offered to read and quickly caught on to the emotional and mental state of the writer of the letters, saying he was ‘lonely, isolated and afraid, but also excited to do something, have the adventure he had always longed for.’
A member of a Shared Reading group in a Category A prison said: ‘We read Frankenstein one chapter at a time. It took us a year! It was a deep one – there was so much to talk about and it was quite exciting because you didn’t know where the conversation would end up.’
English (US) · 