So What Are you Reading?: Generations

[bdub76]

Read 1408 last night. Kinda on a Stephen King binge since I’m reading the Shining for Oct book club while waiting to get Name of the Rose from the library for Sep book club. The Shining is 600 pages, so at my reading pace, I need a head start.

1408 is one of those cases, where I liked the movie better than the novella/short story. It’s a little bit more than 50 pages.

Thinking about reading Children of the Corn tonight. And I’m still working my way through Star Trek short stories. Pacing myself, so that I finish as the next book of short stories comes out for the magazine.

 

[John Clark]

Continuing with Fred the Vampire Accountant series by Drew Hayes.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Continuing with Fred the Vampire Accountant series by Drew Hayes.

Silly title. Sillier premise. Makes me think of an old bit from (I think) Johnny Carson, about incredibly mundane titles for sequels to Conan the Barbarian. (Of course, now we have Conan the Late Night Talk Show Host)

 

[John Clark]

Silly title. Sillier premise. Makes me think of an old bit from (I think) Johnny Carson, about incredibly mundane titles for sequels to Conan the Barbarian. (Of course, now we have Conan the Late Night Talk Show Host)

True - It seems appropriate to the series though the lead character does tend to keep getting dragged into stuff he doesn't want to be dragged into. He'd rather just stick to the accounting

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Sounds like he's the precise antithesis of Leo Bloom.

 

[Stevil2001]

My favorite thing about Dracula is that the process through which Mina compiles the book from journals, letters, transcripts, etc. is itself a driving plot thread in the book, the way they gather information about Dracula and formulate their plans. It's the prose equivalent of a found-footage movie.

Have you read Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White? It uses a similar device to even better effect.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Now about a fifth of the way in. I can't help seeing Peter MacNicol's Renfield, and Harvey Korman's Seward, even though I have yet to encounter anything about enemas (but strangely enough, they do give one a feeling of accomplishment. Not sufficient to overcome the less pleasant feelings . . . ).

 

[bdub76]

Half way through Name of the Rose. Interesting story with unnecessarily difficult vocabulary. Supposed to be a found journal, but some of the more challenging vocabulary didn’t even exist at the time the journal was supposedly written. I know because I’ve had to use my Kindle dictionary far more than usual.

 

[Christopher]

Interesting story with unnecessarily difficult vocabulary.

That's a concept I have trouble understanding. As a kid, I loved finding new words in a book and rushing to the dictionary to find out what they meant. Alan Dean Foster alone contributed abundantly to my vocabulary.

 

[bdub76]

That's a concept I have trouble understanding. As a kid, I loved finding new words in a book and rushing to the dictionary to find out what they meant. Alan Dean Foster alone contributed abundantly to my vocabulary.

It disengages me from the narrative. I really have to read it twice. Once to grasp the language and again to enjoy the story without looking up or translating passages every couple of pages.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Another ADF fan, I see.

I will note that he can manage to throw obscure words into a story without throwing readers out of the story. Not everybody can do that.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

Just finished The Orchard by Beverly Lewis. Amish fiction set during the Vietnam War. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60324185-the-orchard?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=Y39dCmNwgy&rank=1

About to read The Tomb by Stephanie Landsem (book 3 in her "The Living Water" trilogy)

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Now a little over a third of the way into Dracula. Amazing that anybody survived transfusions back before ABO blood types were discovered.

 

[Christopher]

Amazing that anybody survived transfusions back before ABO blood types were discovered.

Naturally it would work when the donor happened to be compatible by the luck of the draw. But they didn't know why it was sometimes fatal and sometimes not, so it was mostly outlawed until they figured out blood types.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Yes, and in addition to discovering ABO, Landsteiner had a hand in discovering Rh, decades later.

 

[Greg Cox]

Now a little over a third of the way into Dracula. Amazing that anybody survived transfusions back before ABO blood types were discovered.

When you're done with Bram Stoker, check out The Dracula Tapes by Fred Saberhagen, which tells the same story but from the Count's POV. And, yes, the Count has some things to say about Van Helsing's reckless use of blood transfusions.

Bottom line: it wasn't Dracula's visits that actually killed Lucy; it was all those mismatched blood transfusions!

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Now past the halfway point in Dracula. Lucy is dead, and apparently also now undead (and with rather strange tastes), and now that Van Helsing has relieved Harker of his uncertainties about what transpired in Transylvania, the latter seems to have recovered his self-confidence.

And I'm still picturing the cast of Dracula: Dead And Loving It. Even though Stoker's Seward has shown no sign of being obsessed with enemas.

 

[JWolf]

And quite literally the only Dracula movies I've ever seen are Nosferatu, by Murnau, and Dracula: Dead and Loving It, by Mel Brooks. Which are just about as far from each other in style and tone as possible.

Yesterday, I read something about Dracula: Dead and Loving It had quite possibly the best "open" of any Dracula movie ever, with its ominous music and its montage of old book illustrations and other art. On reflection, it occured to me that it was hardly the first time Brooks juxtaposed a totally straight open with a comedy film; consider Blazing Saddles, with Frankie Laine (as Brooks puts it) "singing his heart out," completely unaware that it was a comedy.

A Dracula movie that I quite like is Love at First Bite.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Past the 2/3 point, and less than a chapter away from the 3/4 point. Mina seems a bit lethargic.

No sign of any enema obsession with Seward, but then, I wasn't expecting any. But yes, we have nosferatu; we have nosferatu today.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

When you're done with Bram Stoker, check out The Dracula Tapes by Fred Saberhagen, which tells the same story but from the Count's POV. . . .Bottom line: it wasn't Dracula's visits that actually killed Lucy; it was all those mismatched blood transfusions!

Actually, I'm not really into vampires, or generally into horror, for that matter (there's more than enough of that in the real world, these days).

And reading about the Saberhagen is enough to where it seems a tad too revisionist for my taste (you may recall that I regard the 1939 MGM Wizard of Oz to be a hatchet-job, refuse to have anything to do with Maguire's version of Oz, and am not all that fond of Disney's Return to Oz, and the only reason I'm not railing against the Abramsverse is that it's explicitly an alternate timeline). Dracula: Dead and Loving It, and Young Frankenstein, aren't revisionism; they're parody.