What are the three books that the creature reads and what does he learn from each?

From the history of the cottagers, the creature learns to admire virtue and despise vice. His education is greatly furthered by his discovery of an abandoned leather satchel, in which he finds three books: Milton's Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives, and Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther. He regards these books as his treasures, and they are of infinite importance to him: they alternately transport him to the highest ecstasy and cause him the most crushing despair.

The creature is enthralled with Werther's meditations upon death and suicide; with Plutarch's elevated regard for the heroes of past generations; and with the grand themes presented in Paradise Lost. He reads all of the books as though they were true histories, and regards Milton's story of the struggle between God and his creations as completely factual. In his mind, the biblical story defines his own. He does not see himself as Adam, however, but as Satan: unlike Adam, he is alone, without a Creator to protect him or an Eve to sustain him. He is full of envy, wretched, and utterly an outcast.

Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, Milton's Paradise Lost, and a volume of Plutarch's Lives are the 3 books.

Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther: Visiting an idyllic German village, Werther, a sensitive young man, meets and falls in love with sweet-natured Charlotte. Although he realises that she is to marry Albert, he is unable to subdue his passion and his infatuation torments him to the point of despair. The first great 'confessional' novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther draws both on Goethe's own unrequited love for Charlotte Buff and on the death of his friend Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem. The book was an immediate success, and a cult rapidly grew up around it, resulting in numerous imitations as well as violent criticism and suppression on the grounds of its apparent support of suicide.

Milton's Paradise Lost: In his epic poem Paradise Lost Milton conjured up a vast, awe-inspiring cosmos ranging across huge tracts of space and time. And yet, inputting a charismatic Satan and naked Adam and Eve at the centre of this story, he also created an intensely human tragedy on the Fall of Man. Written when Milton was in his fifties - blind, bitter and briefly in danger of execution - Paradise Lost's apparent ambivalence has led to intense debate about whether it manages to 'justify the ways of God to men' or exposes the cruelty of authority.

Plutarch's Lives: a series of 48 biographies of famous men, arranged in tandem to illuminate their common moral virtues or failings, probably written at the beginning of the second century AD.