Book Review: Dracula – by Bram Stoker

Dracula, a mystery by Bram Stoker (1897)

Book: Dracula, a mystery story

Author: Bram Stoker

Original Publisher: Archibald Constable and Company (UK)

Original Date: May 26, 1897

Genre: horror, gothic, mystery

Pages: 408

Price: Kindle currently $0.00 on Amazon; paper $10.51 (sale)

My Rating: WOW! Read this book! Captivating, exciting, spooky.

For some time I had considered reading Dracula, but not being interested in the modern vampire and zombie movies and television programs I avoided it until a year ago. I decided to read some of the classics and chose this one because I had seen the Dracula movie long ago and wanted to be able to say I had read the book. I found it on YouTube and began by listening to it, but then found it for free on Kindle so finished it that way – which was better for me.

This story so captivated me I had to keep reading. Bram Stoker’s writing style and beautiful use of language is thrilling to read, and the characters he created made for such a good story. The only problem was that I had to put the book down when it got late into the evening. It freaked me out a little! Not that I believe Dracula to be real but Stoker’s brilliant writing and settings really spooked me! I couldn’t read it after dark. Now that is good writing. I am so glad I read this book.

The story is written like a diary but with each person writing from their own perspective. If that sounds boring or as if it would be hard to follow, it isn’t at all. It makes it very interesting. The reader wants to keep reading to know what is going on since last hearing from each character, where is Dracula in his plotting, who else is going to meet with trouble at his design, how are they going to defeat him.

Points of interest:

Other titles Stoker had for this book were The Dead Un-Dead, and The Un-dead, before deciding on Dracula
His main character was called Count Wampyr until Stoker came across the name Dracula while researching for the book
Dracula is an old story, but not quite the original vampire story since Stoker borrowed some details from a couple of previous authors, but he built on that and made it better.

Vampire stories told now could not be what they are without Bram Stoker’s Dracula. If you think you know about vampires from what is currently written, do yourself a favour and read Dracula for the ‘real’ story, even though it’s fiction. 🙂 I don’t believe you will be disappointed.

You can find Dracula listed on my BUY THE BOOK!

Thanks for reading, and … Creative Musings! 🙂

‘Read More Books’ challenge: Week 12: 572-623 of the list of 623 of the best books ever!

Are you ready for week twelve of our Read More Books challenge?

Read HERE to learn about it. Although this is the last post of my reading challenge, it’s never too late to check what volumes you may have read on the popular books list. Be sure to visit the site where this list originated, noted at the end.

Look at the ones you may have missed or want to review:

WEEK 1 WEEK 2 WEEK 3 WEEK 4 WEEK 5 WEEK 6 WEEK 7 WEEK 8 WEEK 9 WEEK 10 WEEK 11

How did you do with your reading? Even if you didn’t finish the book you selected, it counts if you select one for this week to add to your TBR pile.

Here is week twelve’s list of books – 51 this time and the final list in this compilation: (Please take note of the credits at the end.)

572. Money — by Martin Amis

573. The Universal Baseball Association, inc. — by Robert Coover

574. Creamy and Delicious — by Steve Katz

575. Tobacco Road — by Erskine Caldwell

576. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge — by Rainer Maria Rilke

577. The Selfish Gene — by Richard Dawkins

578. The Blue Sword — by Robin McKinley

579. An Artist of the Floating World — by Kazuo Ishiguro

580. This Side of Paradise — by F. Scott Fitzgerald

581. Rubyfruit Jungle — by Rita Mae Brown

582. Jurassic Park — by Michael Crichton

583. La Modification — by Michel Butor

584. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money — by John Maynard Keynes

585. The Clan of the Cave Bear — by Jean M. Auel

586. The Colour of Magic — by Terry Pratchett

587. More Than Human — by Theodore Sturgeon

588. The Origins of Totalitarianism — by Hannah Arendt

589. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting — by Milan Kundera

590. The Prince of Tides — by Pat Conroy

591. The Alchemist — by Paulo Coelho

592. Goodbye to All That — by Robert Graves

593. Cry, the Beloved Country — by Alan Paton

594. Mulligan Stew — by Gilbert Sorrentino

595. L. A. Confidential — by James Ellroy

596. The Affluent Society — by John Kenneth Galbraith

597. The Rosy Crucifixion — by Henry Miller

598. Katherine — by Anya Seton

599. A Little Princess — by Frances Hodgson Burnett

600. The Beautiful and Damned — by F. Scott Fitzgerald

601. Wise Children — by Angela Carter

602. The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights — by Richard Burton

603. A People’s History of the United States — by Howard Zinn

604. The Van — by Roddy Doyle

605. The Good Soldier Svejk — by Jaroslav Hasek

606. The Autobiography of Malcolm X — by Malcolm X

607. Easy Travel to Other Planets — by Ted Mooney

608. The Postman Always Rings Twice — by James M. Cain

609. Where Angels Fear to Tread — by E. M. Forster

610. Sometimes a Great Notion — by Ken Kesey

611. Gaston, tome 1 — by André Franquin

612. Tours of the Black Clock — by Steve Erickson

613. Girls in Love — by Jacqueline Wilson

614. Earthly Powers — by Anthony Burgess

615. Eminent Victorians — by Lytton Strachey

616. The Ginger Man — by J. P. Donleavy

617. Hawaii — by James A. Michener

618. In Memoriam to Identity — by Kathy Acker

619. The Princess Diaries — by Meg Cabot

620. The Second World War — by Winston S. Churchill

621. The Education of Little Tree — by Forrest Carter

622. The Horse Whisperer — by Nicholas Evans

623. Hogg — by Samuel R. Delany

Note: I got permission to share this list on my blog. Please go HERE for the complete list of “623 of the best books ever written”; see them all at once for yourself with full colour book covers. (Thank you, Stuart, for allowing me to share your list over twelve blog posts.) Stuart has also provided links to Amazon for purchasing your own copies of the books you want to read, so please visit his site and bookmark it. This will make it easier for you to revisit the complete list and shop easier, plus read reviews on Amazon by other readers.

I hope you enjoyed this walk through a library of some of the best books ever written. It seemed a fun way to bring to your attention many more books than you may have considered reading. This exercise has shown me I am not the reader I thought I was, and stirred my interest in many of the books on this list.

I love to hear from you! From the above list:

Which books have you read?
Which books do you want to read?
Which books are you going to obtain this week?(Even if you did not officially take the Read More Books challenge I would love to hear about your reading.)

Thank you for going on this adventure with books with me. Now, to sum it all up, if you would like to go back over all twelve posts that make up this list, once you add up the ones you’ve read I’d like to know how many you can claim to have read. Please leave a comment.

Thanks for reading, and … Creative Musings! 🙂

‘Read More Books’ challenge: Week 10: 468-519 of the list of 623 of the best books ever!

Are you ready for week ten of our Read More Books challenge?

Read HERE to learn about it. It’s never too late to join in.

Check the ones you may have missed or want to review:

WEEK ONE WEEK TWO WEEK THREE WEEK FOUR WEEK FIVE WEEK SIX WEEK SEVEN WEEK EIGHT WEEK NINE

How did you do with your reading? Even if you didn’t finish the book you selected, it counts if you select one for this week to add to your TBR pile.

468. A Room of One’s Own — by Virginia Woolf

469. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy — by John le Carré

470. Berlin Alexanderplatz — by Alfred Döblin

471. Cold Sassy Tree — by Olive Ann Burns

472. Look Homeward, Angel — by Thomas Wolfe

473. The Martian Chronicles — by Ray Bradbury

474. Skinny Legs and All — by Tom Robbins

475. Oliver Twist — by Charles Dickens

476.It — by Stephen King

477.A High Wind in Jamaica — by Richard Hughes

478. Cities of Salt — by Abdelrahman Munif

479. You Shall Know Our Velocity — by Dave Eggers

480. Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein — by Marguerite Duras

481. The Death of Artemio Cruz — by Carlos Fuentes

482. The Power and the Glory — by Graham Greene

483. War and Remembrance — by Herman Wouk

484. Baudolino — by Umberto Eco

485. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant — by Anne Tyler

486. The age of wire and string — by Ben Marcus

487. The Sorrows of Young Werther — by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

488. Where the Wild Things Are — by Maurice Sendak

489. Night Watch — by Terry Pratchett

490. Tropismes — by Nathalie Sarraute

491. Tlooth — by Harry Mathews

492. The Godfather — by Mario Puzo

493. Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me — by Richard Fariña

494. Pricksongs & descants — by Robert Coover

495. Waiting for the Mahatma — by R. K. Narayan

496. The Journal of Jules Renard — by Jules Renard

497. Notes from a small island — by Bill Bryson

498. Centennial — by James A. Michener

499. the man in the high castle — by Philip K. Dick

500. The Last Chronicle of Barset — by Anthony Trollope

501. Night — by Elie Wiesel

502. The Pickwick Papers — by Charles Dickens

503. Écrits — by Jacques Lacan

504. Silent Spring — by Rachel Carson

505. Jayber Crow — by Wendell Berry

506. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont — by Elizabeth Taylor

507. The road from Coorain — by Jill Ker Conway

508. The Theater and Its Double — by Antonin Artaud

509. The Three Musketeers — by Alexandre Dumas

510. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas — by Gertrude Stein

511. Little, Big — by John Crowley

512. Manhattan Transfer — by John Dos Passos

513. A Brief History of Time — by Stephen Hawking

514. Candide — by Voltaire

515. The Sheltering Sky — by Paul Bowles

516. Popol Vuh — by Anonymous

517. Time and Again — by Jack Finney

518. Moravagine — by Blaise Cendrars

519. The Left Hand of Darkness — by Ursula K. Le Guin

I love to hear from you! From the above list:

Which books have you read?
Which books do you want to read?
Which books are you going to obtain this week?(Even if you are not officially taking the Read More Books challenge I would love to hear about your reading.)

Note: I got permission to share this list on my blog. (Thank you, Stuart!) You could go HERE for the list of “623 of the best books ever written” and see them all at once for yourself, and/or you can follow the list here a few at a time.

Thanks for reading, and … Creative Musings!

‘Read More Books’ challenge: Week 9: 416-467 of the list of 623 of the best books ever!

Are you ready for week nine of our Read More Books challenge?

Read HERE to learn about it. It’s never too late to join in.

Check the ones you may have missed or want to review:

WEEK ONE WEEK TWO WEEK THREE WEEK FOUR WEEK FIVE WEEK SIX WEEK SEVEN WEEK EIGHT

How did you do with your reading? Even if you didn’t finish the book you selected, it counts if you select one for this week to add to your TBR pile.

416. Petersburg — by Andrei Bely

417. City of Glass — by Paul Auster

418. Watchmen — by Alan Moore

419. The Satanic Verses — by Salman Rushdie

420. Libra — by Don DeLillo

421. Friday, or, The Other Island — by Michel Tournier

422. The Shadow of the Wind — by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

423. Parade’s End — by Ford Madox Ford

424. The Pursuit of Love — by Nancy Mitford

425. Always Coming Home — by Ursula K. Le Guin

426. The Princesse de Cleves — by Madame de La Fayette

427. Naked Lunch — by William S. Burroughs

428. Black Beauty — by Anna Sewell

429. The Savage Detectives — by Roberto Bolaño

430. London Fields — by Martin Amis

431. Infinite Jest — by David Foster Wallace

432. Artemis Fowl — by Eoin Colfer

433. Les Vrilles de La Vigne — by Colette

434. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time — by Mark Haddon

435. Zuleika Dobson — by Max Beerbohm

436. Testament of Youth — by Vera Brittain

437. Capital of Pain — by Paul Eluard

438. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn — by Betty Smith

439. Half of a Yellow Sun — by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

440. A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories — by Flannery O’Connor

441. Martin Eden — by Jack London

442. Red Harvest — by Dashiell Hammett

443. Noughts & Crosses — by Malorie Blackman

444. The Leopard — by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa

445. The Alexandria Quartet — by Lawrence Durrell

446. The Ballad of the Salt Sea — by Hugo Pratt

447. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love — by Raymond Carver

448. Haroun and the Sea of Stories — by Salman Rushdie

449. Writing Degree Zero — by Roland Barthes

450. Cane — by Jean Toomer

451. The Lovely Bones — by Alice Sebold

452. Tales of the City — by Armistead Maupin

453. The Joy Luck Club — by Amy Tan

454. Mort — by Terry Pratchett

455. The Opposing Shore — by Julien Gracq

456. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences — by Michel Foucault

457. Riddley Walker — by Russell Hoban

458. Of Human Bondage — by W. Somerset Maugham

459. Go in beauty — by William Eastlake

460. A Separate Peace — by John Knowles

461. The Quiet American — by Graham Greene

462. Dracula — by Bram Stoker

463. The Franchiser — by Stanley Elkin

464. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — by Robert M. Pirsig

465. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute — by Grace Paley

466. Guards! Guards! — by Terry Pratchett

467. Ellen Foster — by Kaye Gibbons

I love to hear from you! From the above list:

Which books have you read?
Which books do you want to read?
Which books are you going to obtain this week?(Even if you are not officially taking the Read More Books challenge I would love to hear about your reading.)

Thanks for reading, and … Creative Musings!

‘Read More Books’ challenge: Week 8: 364-415 of the list of 623 of the best books ever!

Are you ready for week eight of our Read More Books challenge?

Read HERE to learn about it. It’s never too late to join in.

Check the ones you may have missed or want to review:

WEEK ONE WEEK TWO WEEK THREE WEEK FOUR WEEK FIVE WEEK SIX WEEK SEVEN

How did you do with your reading? Even if you didn’t finish the book you selected, it counts if you select one for this week to add to your TBR pile.

364. Father and Sons — by Ivan Turgenev

365. A Wild Sheep Chase — by Haruki Murakami

366. Point Counter Point — by Aldous Huxley

367. Babbitt — by Sinclair Lewis

368. The Souls of Black Folk — by W. E. B. Du Bois

369. The Thirty-Nine Steps — by John Buchan

370. The Jungle — by Upton Sinclair

371. Under Satan’s Sun — by Georges Bernanos

372. The Voyeur — by Alain Robbe-Grillet

373. The Secret Agent — by Joseph Conrad

374. All Quiet on the Western Front — by Erich Maria Remarque

375. Double or Nothing — by Rayond Federman

376. The Bonfire of the Vanities — by Tom Wolfe

377. The Phantom Tollbooth — by Norton Juster

378. Amers/Oiseaux/Poesie — by Saint-John Perse

379. The House of the Spirits — by Isabel Allende

380. Paradise Lost — by John Milton

381. The Joke — by Milan Kundera

382. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz — by L. Frank Baum

383. At Swim-Two-Birds — by Flann O’Brien

384. Contempt — by Alberto Moravia

385. Dealing with Dragons — by Patricia C. Wrede

386. Blood Meridian — by Cormac McCarthy

387. The Home and the World — by Rabindranath Tagore

388. 2001: A Space Odyssey — by Arthur C. Clarke

389. American Pastoral — by Philip Roth

390. The Cannibal — by John Hawkes

391.Matilda — by Roald Dahl

392.The Thornbirds — Colleen McCullough

393. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd — Agatha Christie

394.Good Night, Mr. Tom — Michelle Magorian

395. Nadja — André Breton

396.King Lear — William Shakespeare

397. The Magnificent Ambersons — Booth Tarkington

398.Othello — William Shakespeare

399. Aurélien — Louis Aragon

400.Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World — Haruki Murakami

401.The Color of Water — James McBride

402.Soulier De Satin — Paul Claudel

403. Leaves of Grass — Walt Whitman

404. The Sonnets — William Shakespeare

405.American Psycho — Bret Easton Ellis

406. The Bean Trees — Barbara Kingsolver

407. Nightwood —by Djuna Barnes

408. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction — by J. D. Salinger

409. High Fidelity — Nick Hornby

410. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas — Hunter S. Thompson

411. Kane and Abel — Jeffrey Archer

412. Franny and Zooey — J. D. Salinger

413. The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui —by Bertolt Brecht

414. Sense and Sensibility — Jane Austen

415.The Faraway Tree Stories — Enid Blyton

I love to hear from you! From the above list:

Which books have you read?
Which books do you want to read?
Which books are you going to obtain this week?(Even if you are not officially taking the Read More Books challenge I would love to hear about your reading.)

Thanks for reading, and … Creative Musings!

‘Read More Books’ challenge: Week 7: 312-363 of the list of 623 of the best books ever!

Are you ready for week seven of our Read More Books challenge?

Read HERE to learn about it. It’s never too late to join in.

Check the ones you may have missed or want to review:

WEEK ONE WEEK TWO WEEK THREE WEEK FOUR WEEK FIVE WEEK SIX

How did you do with your reading? Even if you didn’t finish the book you selected, it counts if you select one for this week to add to your TBR pile.

312. Confessions — by Saint Augustine

313. The Golden Bowl — by Henry James

314. Belle Du Seigneur — by Albert Cohen

315. A Town Like Alice — by Nevil Shute

316. Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch — by Neil Gaiman

317. Three Men in a Boat — by Jerome K. Jerome

318. Leviathan — by Thomas Hobbes

319. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists — by Robert Tressell

320. Bastard Out of Carolina — by Dorothy Allison

321. Hamlet — by William Shakespeare

322. Sister Carrie — by Theodore Dreiser

323. Death Comes for the Archbishop — by Willa Cather

324. The Sea, the Sea — by Iris Murdoch

325. The French Lieutenant’s Woman — by John Fowles

326. The Pillars of The Earth — by Ken Follett

327. Dhalgren — by Samuel R. Delany

328. Swallows and Amazons — by Arthur Ransome

329. History of the Peloponnesian War — by Thucydides

330. The Picture of Dorian Gray — by Oscar Wilde

331. A handful of dust — by Evelyn Waugh

332. The Diary of a Nobody — by George Grossmith

333. The Stain — by Rikki Ducornet

334. Snow Country — by Yasunari Kawabata

335. The Bone People — by Keri Hulme

336. The God of Small Things — by Arundhati Roy

337. Zazie dans le Métro — by Raymond Queneau

338. Lord Jim — by Joseph Conrad

339. Neuromancer — by William Gibson

340. Treasure Island — by Robert Louis Stevenson

341. Ragtime — by E. L. Doctorow

342. The Kite Runner — by Khaled Hosseini

343. Confusion: The Private Papers of Privy Councillor R. von D. — by Stefan Zweig

344. A Wizard of Earthsea — by Ursula K. Le Guin

345. The Warden — by Anthony Trollope

346. The Riddle of the Sands — by Erskine Childers

347. Gormenghast — by Mervyn Peake

348. The Secret History — by Donna Tartt

349. Lookout Cartridge — by Joseph McElroy

350. The Shell Seekers — by Rosamunde Pilcher

351. The BFG — by Roald Dahl

352. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich — by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

353. The Heart of the Matter — by Graham Greene

354. Call it Sleep — by Henry Roth

355. Bonjour Tristesse — by Françoise Sagan

356. Sophie’s World — by Jostein Gaarder

357. The Da Vinci Code — by Dan Brown

358. The Sot-Weed Factor — by John Barth

359. Le Silence de La Mer — by Vercors

360. Bridget Jones’s Diary — by Helen Fielding

361. Deliverance — by James Dickey

362. Genoa — by Paul Metcalf

363. Snow Falling on Cedars — by David Guterson

I love to hear from you! From the above list:

Which books have you read?
Which books do you want to read?
Which books are you going to obtain this week?(Even if you are not officially taking the Read More Books challenge I would love to hear about your reading.)

There will not be a book list next week because on November 28 we get to read the next installment of Sue Harrison’s writers workshop. This gives us an extra week for reading until week 8’s book reading challenge on December 5.

Thanks for reading, and … Creative Musings!

‘Read More Books’ challenge: Week 6: 260-311 of the list of 623 of the best books ever!

Are you ready for week six of our Read More Books challenge?

Read HERE to learn about it. It’s never too late to join in.

Check the ones you may have missed or want to review:

WEEK ONE WEEK TWO WEEK THREE WEEK FOUR WEEK FIVE

How did you do with your reading? Even if you didn’t finish the book you selected, it counts if you select one for this week to add to your TBR pile.

260. Les Misérables — by Victor Hugo

261. Tristes Tropiques — by Claude Lévi-Strauss

262. Dream of the Red Chamber — by Tsao Hsueh-Chin

263. Slouching Towards Bethlehem — by Joan Didion

264. Old Goriot — by Honoré de Balzac

265. Oscar and Lucinda — by Peter Carey

266. The Interrogation — by J. M. G. Le Clezio

267. Appointment in Samarra — by John O’Hara

268. A House for Mr. Biswas — by V. S. Naipaul

269. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer — by Patrick Suskind

270. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets — by J. K. Rowling

271. The Secret Garden — by Frances Hodgson Burnett

272. Asterix the Gaul — by René Goscinny

273. The Wasp Factory — by Iain Banks

274. The Fountainhead — by Ayn Rand

275. Four Plays — by Eugene Ionesco

276. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban — by J. K. Rowling

277. Germinal — by Émile Zola

278. The Moonstone — by Wilkie Collins

279. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha — by Roddy Doyle

280. Sixty Stories — by Donald Barthelme

281. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality — by Sigmund Freud

282. Waiting for the Barbarians — by J. M. Coetzee

283. Angela’s Ashes — by Frank McCourt

284. The Abyss — by Marguerite Yourcenar

285. The Way We Live Now — by Anthony Trollope

286. The Rifles — by William Vollmann

287. Democracy in America; and Two essays on America — by Alexis de Tocqueville

288. Cranford — by Elizabeth Gaskell

289. A Christmas Carol — by Charles Dickens

290. Fahrenheit 451 — by Ray Bradbury

291. The Rocognitions — by William Gaddis

292. On the Origins of Species — by Charles Darwin

293. Sula — by Toni Morrison

294. Daniel Deronda — by George Eliot

295. The Tartar Steppe — by Dino Buzzati

296. Young Lonigan — by James T. Farrell

297. On the Social Contract — by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

298. Sea of Poppies — by Amitav Ghosh

299. Portnoy’s Complaint — by Philip Roth

300. Shadow of the Torturer — by Gene Wolfe

301. Das Kapital — by Karl Marx

302. Cider with Rosie — by Laurie Lee

303. The Prince — by Niccolò Machiavelli

304. The Horseman on the Roof — by Jean Giono

305. The Executioner’s Song — by Norman Mailer

306. Atlas Shrugged — by Ayn Rand

307. Suite Française — by Irene Nemirovsky

308. Mountains Beyond Mountains — by Tracy Kidder

309. Cold Comfort Farm — by Stella Gibbons

310. The Story of Tracy Beaker — by Jacqueline Wilson

311. Angle of Repose — by Wallace Stegner

I love to hear from you! From the above list:

Which books have you read?
Which books do you want to read?
Which books are you going to obtain this week?(Even if you are not officially taking the Read More Books challenge I would love to hear about your reading.)