I'm a Bookworm

I got an iPod touch for my birthday, and there is a great little app for it called Stanza – it lets you download e-books and read them on the iPod. Now I’m normally against fancy gadgets replacing books, but the great thing about Stanza is that it gives me free and easy access to loads of books in the public domain (books whose copyrights have expired because the author died more than 50 years ago).

So anyway, I’ve been reading some great old classics, trying to work my way through a 100 Greatest Books article I found somewhere. One of the books I’ve recently really enjoyed is Dracula, by Bram Stoker.

Of course I was familiar with the vampire mythology and the general outline of the story from various films and pop culture references, but I found it really interesting to get down to the source material behind the various film adaptations and other twists on the vampire theme. The story is laid out in a collection of diary entries and letters from the various characters, and this lends it an air of authenticity, as if Stoker had simply found a bundle of documents relating to the case.

The reason I’m writing this post is because I’ve recently found out that an official sequel to Dracula has been released, written by the original authors great grand-nephew, Dacre Stoker, in conjunction with a notable ‘Dracula Historian’ (best job ever?).

Of course there have been loads of follow-ups to Dracula, of varying degrees of quality. In my opinion the most ridiculous of these is the 1991 novel Dracula Unbound, which asks the question; ‘What if Dracula had a time machine?’.

The new novel keeps well away from that kind of thing, and is actually based on Bram Stoker’s original notes from the first novel. It is set 25 years after the events of the original, and the protagonist is the son of Jonathon and Mina Harker, two of the main characters in the first novel.

Anyway, it looks to be a really interesting read and I’ll definitely be checking it out.