The book choice for the month of April at Book Club was the gothic horror classic Dracula by Bram Stoker
This is the first horror my Book Club has read and it was a really interesting book choice, not one I'd ever have picked off the bookshelf myself, so it was great to read a classic.
There are a few different versions of Dracula, the one I read was almost 500 pages long and started with a foreword by Elizabeth Kostova who explained that the story is written and put together from diary entries and letters between the characters. This made the story easier for me to understand, as I have not watched nor read any Dracula stories before.
Dracula is based in the late 1800s and the story is about Count Dracula a vampire, who travels from Transylvania to England to pray on unsuspecting town folk. There are a group of respectable characters and fair maidens in despair who try to stop Dracula from his blood sucking ways. There was a sense of impending dread throughout the story, however I thought there would be more horror, blood and gore and was relieved it wasn't as gruesome as I'd imagined it would be.
The story was well researched and the characters all very descriptive and likable. I have great admiration for the fact that this book was written so many years ago and still remains a classic gothic horror story to this day.
Sometimes I was interested in the adventures the characters were going through, but most of the time I felt it really dragged on and stayed too long on one part of the story. This made the story very long and a struggle to get through and in fact many members of my book club hadn't finished reading it before our meet up. I also found the writing in the book quite hard to follow, I always find the old English language hard to read and keep the story progressing.
I would recommend this book to horror fans both young and old as I think such a classic should be read and appreciated across the generations.
I give this book 2 stars out of
5
Jarrah Jungle's Star
Rating:
1 Bad - I'd rather eat brussel sprouts topped with anchovies
than read this again
2 Not Good - I'd rather watch re-runs of Neighbours than read this again
3 Ok - I'm sitting on the fence - its not great but not terrible either
4 Good - I'd pass up a pack of tim tams for this read
5 Great - I'd pass up a date with Johnny Depp for this read
2 Not Good - I'd rather watch re-runs of Neighbours than read this again
3 Ok - I'm sitting on the fence - its not great but not terrible either
4 Good - I'd pass up a pack of tim tams for this read
5 Great - I'd pass up a date with Johnny Depp for this read
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[Image via Amazon]
One of the best things about book clubs is having the opportunity and the motivation necessary to read books you normally wouldn't choose for yourself. I haven't Dracula, and it sounds I would have struggled with it. Books that go on for too long generally are annoying but even more so when they are from a genre that you wouldn't really read!
ReplyDeleteThat is so true, its one of the reasons I joined a book club so I would read different books instead of the same genres all the time which gets a bit boring.
DeleteIm with you, it was a struggle to finish and a bit too long for me.