Melvin Felix

As Spanish soccer fans celebrated their Euro 2012 victory by thrashing in the Washington Square Park fountain yesterday afternoon, members of the East Village Book Club sat in a grassy corner of the park and pondered the birth of Frankenstein’s monster.

The book club had decided to take its monthly discussion, which usually occurs at Bar on A, outdoors for the first time since its inaugural meeting in Tompkins Square Park last November.

Melvin Felix The East Village Book Club

Sitting in a circle around cookies and chicken fajitas, the group of eight agreed that there was more to Mary Shelley’s classic novel than a mad scientist screaming, “It’s alive!”

“The movies massacred what the book was all about,” said Ranita Saha, a long-time member who commutes from the Bronx.

Jae Disbrow, the East Village resident who created the club, picked this month’s book for its philosophical and existential themes. “It gets a really bad rap,” she said. “I had to convince some of our members that it’s not like the book ‘Dracula.’ It has a lot of subtext and a lot of good things about it.” Read more…