I don't think I'm going to manage to complete another book before the end of 2023 now, so it seems like time to post this list of what I read this year, with brief notes on each. I don't have pictures of all of them, because I've already returned one borrowed book to its owner and read another on Kindle, but these are the ones I do have:


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Still trying valiantly to catch up, here...


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It's another catch-up post in an attempt to clear the unwritten book review slates. Just brief notes on what I can now remember of each. Some were read on Kindle or borrowed from a friend, so aren't in the picture.


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In a further effort to clear the review slate, here are the books which I read in 2020 but haven't reviewed and am clearly now not going to.


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I've got so behind with book reviews that I'm here reviewing a book I read in July last year. It's partly because of an intensive autumn / winter (teaching) and then spring (LibDemmery), but it's also because I got a bit stuck on this particular review, wanting to articulate complex things about the presentation of narrative raised by the stories ( Read more... )

After reading Peter Tremayne's Dracula Unborn ( LJ / DW), I decided it was finally time to read the book which had inspired it, and so many others like it, in the first place. I read Florescu and McNally's Dracula, Prince of Many Faces, which focuses on the historical Dracula, three years ago ( LJ / DW), and for a long time have felt that I didn't ( Read more... )

This is a terrible-brilliant book about Vlad as Dracula, and the first of a trilogy. It's one of many written following the publication of Radu Florescu and Raymond McNally (1972), In Search of Dracula, which took their (rather over-egged) argument that Stoker's Dracula was based on a profound and detailed knowledge of the life of the historical ( Read more... )

This is a collection of short stories whose author is known in this parish as
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I've known for some time that Bram Stoker secured the stage copyright for Dracula by putting on a reading of it at the Lyceum a week before the book itself was published. The script for this reading was basically constructed out of the dialogue from the novel, cut out from the editorial proofs, pasted onto sheets of paper, and supplemented by stage ( Read more... )

This is the second book I read for the now-unlikely-to-happen DracSoc trip to Bath, again because its author lived there in the early to mid '70s. On one level it is a series of ten 'takes' on traditional fairy-tales, but even to say that rather over-simplifies and understates what Carter does with them. Most are entirely recast, reset, reframed - ( Read more... )