For the past 187 days (actually longer than that, as I suspended delivery for a bit over Christmas when I wasn't checking my email as much) a short section of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) has appeared in my inbox, courtesy of DailyLit. This is the third or fourth book I've read this way, and I am surprised with how much I like it. Since I'm a pretty fast reader, this forces me to slow down and spend more time with a book than I usually do. And since I love vampires, I had no problem at all spending 187 days with Dracula.Dracula is so entrenched in our culture that I couldn't believe I'd never read the Bram Stoker novel. Hadn't I seen the story about a million times? Stoker's novel gives you everything you would expect the seminal vampire story to provide -- creepy castle, beautiful and pure ladies, valiant men, the smart vampire hunter, the cunning Count, plus lots of coffins, earth, wolves, and blood. The story is told primarily through the diaries of a group of people brought together by friendship, circumstance, and the vampire's curse. The archivist in me loved the emphasis on documenting conversations and thoughts in order to review them as a group and solve the mystery of the vampire. Documents!
Even though I was familiar with the story, it still took some twists I hadn't encountered in other interpretations. And speaking of other interpretations, when I was about halfway through this book we rented Guy Maddin's film, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary -- which is sort of a ballet, sort of a silent movie, and all kinds of awesomely Guy Maddin. You should watch it. [And the picture above is a still from that movie.]
My next DailyLit adventure: War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. I shall report back in approximately 73 days.
4 comments:
i've been hooked on daily lit too! i'm reading some cory doctrow (down and out in the magic kingdom) and i agree it makes you slow down a little. although on the weekend i have been known to read a few installments at a time while drinking my coffee.
I haven't gotten around to Dracula yet, but I've been surprised by almost every 19th century novel that's been done to death in the last century or so that I've read. Frankenstein, for example, totally blew my lid when I finally read it, and War of the Worlds is really great. It actually scared me. I may have to sign up for this dailylit deal.
Ironically, I think it will take me that long to finish Dracula, but I'm not doing Daily Lit.
Frankenstein did not impress me, and I struggled to finish it. On the other hand, I read War of the Worlds years ago when I was trying to read sci-fi classics and I thought it was awesome.
I thought Frankenstein was awesome when I read it a few years ago, and since I loved The Invisible Man and The Time Machine I have high hopes for War of the Worlds...
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