Somehow I ended up doing a bunch of pre-20th century group reads lately. Out of all of them, this is by far the book I like the best. Dracula is wonderfully atmospheric but also painfully racist; Moby Dick's best parts are absolutely gorgeous but it could have done with a massive edit, also racism; I got bored of Don Quixote after a while. But this one is wonderfully and tightly written, and I'm reasonably confident that everything obnoxious in it is intentionally so (in short: oh, Victor is so perfectly hateable).