an outstanding opening chapter

Dracula. Couldn’t sleep tonight (jetlag again) so pulled it off the shelf and dug in once more. I love that book.

Dracula, much like Frankenstein, is one of those books that people don’t feel like they actually need to read. Our culture is so saturated with these stories, after all. That makes the books the victims of their own success. But they are so much better, qua books, than any pop cultural translation of them. Both are outstanding.

As for Frankenstein, pretty much everyone I know who has actually read the book has roughly the same reaction. Something like this: “What? I didn’t realize it was that good.”