Dracula

I really liked how much research Stoker put into this book. So much lore, vampire and otherwise is in this novel and it was really enjoyable. This was my first time reading the original Dracula story and I was surprised by how central Jonathan Harker was. Every spin-off, re-vamp, or retelling I've read made out Harker to be quite insignificant, sometimes even a measly assistant to Van Helsing. But Harker is the one who originally discovers Dracula and who tells a good half of the story. I also really liked how the story was told through a series of journal entries and letters rearranged into chronological order. It's not a common method of story telling and it's always an interesting and refreshing change. I also thought is was quite interesting how while the wooden stakes, garlic, crucifixes, wafers and holy water were in here Dracula could actually walk around during the day. I supposed light burning a Vampire was added into the lore in another book or movie.

“Suddenly, I became conscious of the fact that the driver was in the act of pulling up the horses in the courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whose tall, black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the sky… “Welcome to my house! Enter freely. Go safely, and leave something of the happiness you bring!” “What sort of adventure was it on which I had embarked?” Of all of the protagonists, it is the supporting character Quincey P. Morris who stole my heart! It is the sacrifice of his life that slays the vampire, and it is in his memory Jonathan and Mina name their first born son. His proposal to Mina’s best friend is my aspiration: “Miss Lucy, I know I ain’t good enough to regulate the fixin’s of your little shoes, but I guess if you wait till you find a man that is you will go join them seven young women with the lamps when you quit. Won’t you just hitch up alongside of me and let us go down the long road together, driving in double harness?” As an obsessive writer, I loved the epistolary genre of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. “How many of us begin a new record with each day of our lives?” Journaling “is like whispering to one’s self and listening at the same time…As I must do something or go mad, I write this diary…All, big and little, must go down. Perhaps at the end the little things may teach us most…it is in trouble and trial that our faith is tested. That we must keep on trusting, and that God will lead us up to the end…For life be, after all, only a waitin’ for somethin’ else than what we’re doin,’ and death be all that we can rightly depend on…For each sunrise and sunset opens up some new danger–some new pain, which however, may in God’s will be means to a good end.”

This was brilliant as an audio book. As with many classics, it contains a lot of tangential rambling from the characters that, if I had read, probably would have put me off. But the audio allowed to gloss over those and focus only on the main bits. The main plot is more interesting than I would have thought and it moves at a decent pace ignoring all the rambles of course.

I've owned the same copy since I was in 5th grade. 2000 (?) Definitely a 10/10

My chalenge to myself over the past year has been to read more of the books on my shelf that I would not usually pick up. Dracula was one of these books. While I did enjoy the overall story as I am a fan of horror and suspense, I do feel that the book is very of its time and would have been more enjoyable without the knowledge now of horror literature. The book itself did drag on but I didn’t mind it.