Book 03: Lady Athlyne by Bram Stoker isbn: 9780979233241, Valancourt Books, 276 pages, $16.95

The Premise: (from the Goodreads page): Joy Ogilvie, the beautiful young daughter of a Kentucky colonel, plays a joke with her friends, pretending to be "Lady Athlyne," after hearing a story about the dashing Irish nobleman Lord Athlyne. Little does she ( Read more... )

So, I ended my last post, Wednesday night, with the following, then never came back to follow-up on the story left untold:

Once home (quickly, thanks to my favorite limo driver who knows all the back-roads), I went and grabbed my mail. 2.5 weeks worth. Plenty of bills and renewal notices and such, and plenty of packages!  Subterranean Press sent ( Read more... )

I finally tallied the numbers for what I read in 2009:

BOOKS:

I read 83 books by 55 different authors / editors (in the case of multi-author anthologies).  The authors I read / listened to the most were Bram Stoker, Jim Butcher, Stephen King, and Neil Gaiman (all of whom should not be a surprise to anyone), with Gabriel Hunt, Edgar Rice Burroughs and ( Read more... )

I wanted to wait until I had read all three of the Bram Stoker story anthologies I have, and then post all three reviews at the same time.  Then I went ahead and read The Lair of the White Worm, so that makes 4 Stoker books in this post.  Needless to say, I'm putting the reviews behind cuts:

( The Story Collections )

Short notes:

* Hotel banquet staff still screwed up the morning continental breakfast set up.  And the message to make sure two of my students got vegetarian meals never got delivered. Good thing I checked at 10am to be sure.  Everything on our contract seems to be too much of a bother for this hotel to accomodate -- it's ridiculous to be so ( Read more... )

On the humorous side, I now think that the pair next door really were husband and wife.  Why?  One of my participants today commented on how her room is on the second floor, and how her husband was here last night but had to leave this morning to go back to their town to work tomorrow, and how the walls are paper-thin and the guy in the next room ( Read more... )

Dracula the Undead by Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt,  isbn 9780525951292, 424 pages, Dutton,  $26.95

I had high hopes for this book. I genuinely wanted to like it. While I can't say I hated it, I can say I was very disappointed.

There have been probably thousands of re-interpretations of Bram Stoker's original story and characters in the 100 or so ( Read more... )

So I figure I'm going to keep track of it like this:  I'll list all 14 of the books I packed for this trip with me, and I'll come back and strike-through the titles as I finish reading each book, and we'll see exactly how many I read.  And since I purchased the new Indiana Jones book tonight (the only book I saw and picked up), I'm going to add ( Read more... )

Trying to catch up on commentary to where I actually am in the novel:

( Chapter Two )

I promised as part of participating in The Great Dracula Read (there is no official name for the project, so I made one up) that I would share my thoughts as I re-read the book this year, on a somewhat chapter-by-chapter basis.

For those keeping track, I opted to go with the Signet Classics paperback edition of Dracula (isbn 9780451530660, $4.95) ( Read more... )