Name: Dracula
ISBN: 9780307743305

Dracula

In the story, a couple and their friends are tormented by Count Dracula—a supernatural, blood-drinking entity bound by a contagious curse—who intends to leave his secluded castle in Transylvania for the bustling London of the 19th century. With the help of Professor Van Helsing, the group sets out to confront the undead, despite all the dangers such an offensive will entail.

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kstenerudOct 2024

Have Space Suit Will Travel (Heinlein)

Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein)

Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (one story in the book "Different Seasons" by Stephen King)

Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck)

The Martian Chronicles (Bradbury)

Roadside Picnic (Strugatsky)

Frankenstein (Shelley)

Brave New World (Huxley)

Farenheit 451 (Heinlein)

Never Cry Wolf (Mowatt)

A Whale for the Killing (Mowatt)

The Machine Stops (Forster)

Heart of Darkness (Conrad)

Starship Troopers (Heinlein)

The Jungle Book (Kipling)

Lost in the Barrens (Mowatt)

The Republic (Plato)

Rendezvous with Rama (Clarke)

Ringworld (Niven)

The Stainless Steel Rat (Harrison)

The Hobbit (Tolkien)

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson)

The Odyssey (Homer)

The Man who Would be King (Kipling)

The Pearl (Steinbeck)

Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche)

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick)

A Scanner Darkly (Dick)

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Adams)

Dracula (Stoker)

To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee)

The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas)

Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)

The Wind in the Willows (Grahame)

A Christmas Carol (Dickens)

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass (Carroll)

Watership Down (Adams)

Gulliver's Travels (Swift)

Animal Farm (Orwell)

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lotsofpizzaAug 2024

The Mist - Stephen King

Cannery Row - Joseph Steinbeck

Post Office - Charles Bukowski

Dracula - Bram Stoker

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jvanderbotAug 2024

I always found these types of things particularly creepy. Scaled up to human level, imagine a creature that trolls around luring you with visually-convincing mates only to eat you.

Bram Stoker's Dracula had a particularly good bodyhorror version of this in the multi-bodied "Woman".

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_upoiFeb 2024

This was a fun read. Merging a few quotes to provide the gist of the article for discussion: "Dracula’s own powers – superhuman strength, the control of local weather, the ability to summon and direct brute creatures – cannot match the powers of his Enemy. And that Enemy is not Dr. Van Helsing or Jonathan Harker or any of the other people who chase him, but rather technocratic modernity itself […]

"Our heroes’ long pursuit of Dracula is largely a matter of tracing the written records of everything Dracula does in England. Note also that the enemies of Dracula coordinate their plan of action with reference to the sequence of events that they have recorded using typewriters and phonographs. (Dracula is the first novel featuring voice memos.) […]

"[And modernity reigns not just in England: even in eastern Europe the pursuers are greatly aided by Mina’s knowledge of when the trains run — and by telegraphs they receive from London. Railway timetables, telegraphs, phonographs, typewriters, invoices, bills of lading, double-entry bookkeeping: these are the instruments by which Dracula’s pursuers draw their net around him."

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meristohmDec 2021

Thanks for the recommendations. I’m feeling old, so I’ll add:

Edith Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote (1609! The more things change, the more they stay the same)

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley (I thought I knew the story until I actually read the book—whoah, that opened my eyes to our relationship with technology and industry and how we use energy)

Dracula, by Bram Stoker (from Blindboy’s podcast episode “Paddy Dracula” I learned Stoker is from Dublin, son of a Protestant mother who told him stories, bedridden until seven years old, about the horrors of cholera)

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville (further awareness of how we convert resources, this time before petrol, and for the descriptions of sea life and human relationships)

For background, I’m also into contemporary sci-fi and fantasy and would have an easier time going without electricity than without books, unless I was part of a community that carried on storytelling traditions.

Two others: Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Finding the Mother Tree, by Suzanne Simard, both about ecology and reciprocity, guiding how I garden, parent, and relate to the bleeding edge of life in general.

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innocentoldguyDec 2021

To your recommendations of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Bram Stoker's Dracula, I'd add Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera. That is by far my most favorite of the classic "monster" books.

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