"Dracula" by Bram Stoker

An appropriate read for October, don't you think?

I first read Dracula in May of 2000 while on tour in Canada with my college's choir.  I was freshly in love with the TV show Angel and its titular vampire hero, and I decided I ought to read the greatest vampire novel of all time.

Maybe this is not a good book to read while riding on a bus for hour after hour.  Or while missing your first real boyfriend, whom you've been dating for like a month.  Or when you're twenty.  I don't know.  I just remember thinking this book was boring and being mad because my favorite character died.

Reading it again at age 40, after spending half my life intrigued by vampires, but also after having read a whole lot more Victorian fiction?  I reeeeeally dug it.  Boring?  Not at all!  I found it tense and fast-paced, with a excellent suspense that mounted page after page.

And this time, my favorite character didn't die.  Because this time, my favorite character was Abram Van Helsing.  (Sorry, Texan.)  My goodness, what a fount of courage, knowledge, and resourcefulness!  I've never been prouder to be half Dutch.

I really liked the epistolary format that Stoker uses, because it made this feel like everything was happening right now.  Very immediate, and great for building suspense toward the end as different characters told what they were doing, and you know what was happening to others, but they didn't.

(My photo from my Instagram account.)

Particularly Good Bits:

The real God taketh heed lest a sparrow fall; but the god created from human vanity sees no difference between an eagle and a sparrow (p. 142).

What a fine fellow is Quincey!  I believe in my heart of hearts that he suffered as much about Lucy's death as any of us; but he bore himself through it like a moral Viking (p. 238).

We are all drifting reefwards now, and faith is our only anchor (p. 424).

How can women help loving men when they are so earnest, and so true, and so brave! (p. 486)

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for scary situations, suspense, and some icky stuff about eating bugs and spiders, plus quite a lot of blood.  It's not gory or graphic like a modern horror novel or thriller, but it's intense sometimes.

This was my seventh book read and reviewed for my third Classics Club list.

"Five Seasons of Angel" edited by Glenn Yeffeth

I don't talk about it much on this blog because this is my book blog, not my movies/writing/life blog, but Angel (1999-2004) is my second-favorite TV show of all time.  This spin-off of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) follows vampire-with-a-soul Angel (David Boreanaz) to Los Angeles as he seeks to make amends for all the harm he had inflicted on others before being cursed with a soul.  It's kind of a supernatural film noir series, especially for the first couple of seasons.

Angel debuted my sophomore year of college, and my roommates insisted I watch the premier episode with them.  I thought it was okay.  Okay enough that I watched the next few with them too, and by episode three, I was hooked for good.  I started watching Buffy with them too, and became a fan of it as well, though not as devotedly.

This book is a collection of essays in which, as the subtitle says, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Discuss Their Favorite Vampire.  Which is a bit misleading, because several of the essays don't focus on Angel himself at all, so maybe it should say Favorite Vampire Show instead?  But that's just quibbling.  This book, as a whole, delighted me.  Considering I've watched this whole series through twice, once in its initial run and once via DVD, and rewatched many episodes many more times than that, I thought I knew the series and Angel's story arc in it pretty well.  But, in fact, this book taught me some things about the show, pointing out nuances I hadn't noticed, and was generally as informative as it was enjoyable.

My favorite essays were:

• "Angelus Populi" by Don DeBrandt
• "That Angel Doesn't Live Here Anymore" by Laura Resnick
• "A World Without Love: The Failure of Family in Angel" by Jean Lorrah
• "It's Not Easy being Green and Nonjudgmental" by Abbie Bernstein
• "Why We Love Lindsey" by Michelle Sagara West
• "The Good Vampire: Angel and Spike" by Peter S. Beagle
• "Victim Triumphant" by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
• "Death Becomes Him: Blondie Bear 5.0" by Nancy Holder
• "True Shanshu" by Laura Anne Gilman
• "There's My Boy..." by Joy Davidson

Um, yes, that's like half the essays.  There were SO MANY excellent ones! If you're a fan of this series, definitely find yourself a copy of this book.

Particularly Good Bits:

Sometimes, when reality is too grim, fantasy is all we have (p. 4, "Angelus Populi" by Don DeBrandt).

It's all about pain.  Ridicule is a way to get rid of your own by forcing it upon someone else (p. 6, "Angelus Populi" by Don DeBrandt).

If we look at the opening credits of every Angel episode, we see a graphic representation of Angel's eternal isolation.  Yes, there are some changing shots of Angel interacting with the cast of each season, but the end of the montage never changes.  our final image of Angel remains that dark silhouette walking away from us into the night. Angel alone (p. 62, "A World Without Love: The Failure of Family in Angel" by Jean Lorrah).

Lorne's not stupid -- he understands the advantages of being a good fighter -- but he sees it as just another quality, like an ability to read auras: nice if you have it, but nothing wrong with you if you don't (p. 71, "It's Not Easy being Green and Nonjudgmental" by Abbie Bernstein).

Angel reveals that life's victims -- not heroes, but people just like us -- are all that stand between us and annihilation (p. 137, "Victim Triumphant" by Jacqueline Lichtenberg).

In [Cordelia's] humanity, we see the best points of the Angelverse: not the strong defending the weak, but the weak learning how to be strong (p. 185, "True Shanshu" by Laura Anne Gilman).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: R for frank discussions of sexual situations and themes and some bad language.  Not a book kids are going to want to read anyway.

This is my 19th book read and reviewed for #theunreadshelfproject2020 :-)

"The Graveyard Book" Graphic Novel Adaptation by Neil Gaiman & P. Craig Russell

You might recall how much I loved The Graveyard Book earlier this year.  Probably my favorite new read in all of 2019 thus far.  Well, when I was buying a copy of my very own, I discovered that there's also a graphic novel adaptation of it!  And I happen to love good graphic novels, so I bought that too, mostly because I liked how they drew Silas on the front cover.

It rocks!  They kept a lot of my favorite lines, the whole story unspools just as delightfully in this format as in the novel, and yeah... I could not be more pleased with it.

They even included the line about Silas not eating bananas.  I am weirdly in love with that line.  "Silans consumed only one food, and it was not bananas" (p. 24).  I do not know why that line delights me so much -- I think it's because it strikes me as the funniest way ever of saying, "This guy is a vampire."  It cracks me up.  I can't even think it in my head without grinning.

In fact, I liked this graphic novel so much that I took about two months to read it because I was savoring it as much as I could.  I got the single-volume edition that has the whole book in it, and it's satisfyingly heavy and substantial and... beautiful.  I have hugged it.

(Mine from Instagram)

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG-13 for scary scenes involving demons, ghosts, witches, and a creepy murderer who tries to kill a baby.

"Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula" by Loren D. Estleman

Hmm.  Well, I liked this well enough to finish the whole book.  And the last sixty pages or so really gripped me.  But overall, I'm afraid this book dragged and was more something I read just to get it off my TBR shelves than because I was enjoying it.

The story is exactly what it sounds like: a mash-up where Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson interact with the characters of Bram Stoker's Dracula and help rid England of the vampire.  

Maybe because I love vampire stories (even though I can't deal with any other kind of horror story), this fell kind of flat for me.  It was very much a re-hashing of Dracula, and we didn't get any new stuff added to that book, really, until those last sixty pages.  That it was new and cool, and I dug it.

Also, Dr. Watson came off as a blundering fool too often for my taste.  It was like this was based more on the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce movies than on the canon itself, and I objected to that.

Particularly Good Bits:

To be forced to stand by helplessly and watch one's entire world rushing headlong towards calamity is a descent into deepest Hell (p. 157).

Outside the window, the first snowflakes of winter were enjoying a brief moment of glory before being trod into an unrecognisable slush beneath the traffic upon the street (p. 181).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for some scary vampire stuff.

This is my 11th book read and reviewed for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge.

"The Graveyard Book" by Neil Gaiman

Oh. My.

So, I've heard some pretty glowing stuff about this book from a lot of people over the past few years.  I even checked it out of the library once, but didn't get around to reading it before it was due.  

Mostly, I wanted to read it because I love graveyards. I love to ramble around in them, reading headstones and soaking up history.  When we lived in Connecticut, there was a massive graveyard a few blocks from our house that was the only really wide-open space with grass and trees that we could find for my energy-soaked toddler to run around in.  It was a popular spot for joggers and other moms with strollers.

Anyway.  I just never quite got interested enough in this book to read it until I read somewhere recently that it's a retelling of The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling.  I adore The Jungle Book, especially Bagheera, the massive black panther guardian of little Mowgli.  So I thought I'd give this a try at last.  Especially since I enjoyed The Ocean at the End of the Lane so much.

Reader, I loved it.  LOVED IT, I SAY.  

Especially Silas, the Bagheera character who was a vampire.  Honestly, if someone had just said to me, "Bagheera is a vampire in this book!" I would have snatched it up immediately.  Because I also love vampires.  Especially really good vampire guardians who use their majestic, undying power to care for and protect someone.  (My second-favorite TV show of all time is Angel, the spin-off of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and its main character, the protective good vampire Angel, is one of my 5 favorite fictional characters of all time.  It's a thing.)  So, yeah, wow.  Silas was amazing.  Also, I love the name Silas because of Slow West (2015), and I had a merry time imagining Michael Fassbender as a vampire, and yeah.  

But the whole book was amazing.  Smart, funny, exciting, scary/creepy in the best ways, and thoroughly satisfying.

A little baby's family is killed by a relentless murderer, the man Jack, but the baby is taken in and protected by the ghosts that live in a nearby graveyard.  They name him Nobody, Bod for short, and raise him in the graveyard.  The vampire Silas reluctantly becomes his guardian, then mentor, then friend, and Bod learns all sorts of unusual skills (I wish I knew how to Fade, because that sounds so handy in so many social situations), and eventually he has to confront his family's murderer, of course.  Oh, it's delicious!  Delicious, I tell you!

This might be the best new-to-me book I've read this year.

Particularly Good Bits:

"I've absolutely no idea," said Silas, who consumed only one food, and it was not bananas (p. 27).

There were people you could hug, and then there was Silas (p. 149).

At the best of times his face was unreadable.  Now his face was a book written in a language long forgotten, in an alphabet unimagined.  Silas wrapped the shadows around him like a blanket, and stared after the way the boy had gone, and did not follow (p. 194).

"You're always you, and that don't change, and you're always changing, and there's nothing you can do about it" (p. 298).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for scary scenes involving murder, ghosts, demons, etc.