Frankenstein

3.5?
Parts of it was exactly what I wanted: man's nature, what it means to create and to be responsible for our creation, difficult decisions, man v man, man v self, man v nature, eloquence, gothic fiction...

At other times it was long winded about things that did not connect (or at least did not seem to) such as the level of detail about the people the creature spent time with. At least when Hugo went on and on about the Paris sewer system it connected in the end.

It helped that I had recently read a graphic adaptation of the story; they helped make sense of each other.