For a very long time, my only understanding of Frankenstein was mistaking the creature as Frankenstein and the 1931 version of the creature's character. A couple years ago I used to listen podcasts on my commute to work, but got bored of that fairly quickly. I don't quite remember what pulled me in, but something got me to check out the audiobook version of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelly, and suddenly I was captivated.
Victor Frankenstein develops this tunnel vision around grief, and the only thing Frankenstein can see at the end of the tunnel is this creature. Through both engineering the creature and encountering it, Frankenstein never truly recognizes what exactly he's done. He fails to see anything while he's making it, and he fails to see anything else when he looks the creature in the eye, and is horrified by it. Upon re-reading, I have realized how Frankenstein has a wealth of allegories.
One of the more prominent parallels for me is this obsession with sidestepping the humanities from innovation. There's this philistinism mindset applied to innovation. This may have been subconsious for Frankenstein; however, through this continuous guise of seeing humanities as "friviluous", "abstract", and thus "irrelevant" it pusshes us towards a type of innovation that may as well not have been attempted in the first place. Frankenstein was stuck in a tunnel vision the whole time - from the process of creation to escape, not once did he truly consider the tornado of feelings and frustrations that the creature may have been experiencing. We can see this with shoehorning of certain technologies failing to acknowledge or effectively address its ramifications.
Frankenstein is timeless for a reason, and because it's timeless, it'll always be a book I come back to.