Dracula

I loved that there were different voice actors for each role. Also I never read the book bc I felt like it was too long and too much prose for me to understand without hearing it, and again each actor did it well. On a personal note, the actor for Solicitor Harker has the absolute most soothing voice. And was amazing when he did Quincy Morris’s Texan accent. He had the perfect voice for Morris. Loved the whole narrative!

It was good for a classic. My husband prefered this much more then me

After reading for 55+ years, I thought it about time to read the "real" Dracula and I'm glad I did.The book is intriguing and suspensful without being gory or bloody. A lot of history about Dracula is given and also explains why he does what he does. The book is written as diary entries by all the major characters; gives great perspective.The only negative comment is that some of the journal entries use less than proper grammar (he has brain of child, he weak, etc. This detracts from the otherwise well-written book.

The book was filled with unnecessary, long, drawn out conversations. The overall plot was the only thing that kept me reading.

I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed this book. A lot of times with classics, they get so much hype and end up being either boring or impossible to read. This was neither. While to story was slow-paced, it wasn’t boringly so. It was very simple the way it was told and how the plot unfolded, but it was refreshing. So many times stories are so convoluted that, even though it’s fiction, it has you shaking your head. More isn’t always better and this book demonstrated that.I think what I liked best was they way it was told by the points of view of several of the characters as written in their personal and professional journals. Sometimes there was two viewpoints of the same situation. I read along with the book as I listened and it was very easy to follow. I feel I could have read the book without the aid of the audio… But who would turn down a performance by Tim Curry? Not this girl! All of the voice actors did a wonderful job bring the book to life. It was a pleasure to listen to/read.

Book - DraculaAuthor ? Bram StokerStar rating - ????? Would I read it again - Probably notPlot ? good story, long winded, could have been betterCharacters ? varied: some are interesting, some are a bit boringMovie Potential - ???? Ease of reading ? bit long windedSo I'm a bit half and half with this one. I've been dying to read it for a while, but I'm still undecided as to what I actually think. And when I think of all the books/movies/tv shows this book has spawned, I'm a little confused. But then again, I said the same thing about the Vampire Diaries.I love the first ~20% of the story, with Jonathan Harker and Dracula. The story was interesting, I like the way that Jonathan's diary was written and the way he portrayed himself and Dracula. There was a lot of mystery to it, a lot of speculation and uncertainty. Even though everyone knows, when they read the book nowadays that Dracula is a vampire, you get a sense that you're not sure, and neither if Jonathan in this part of the story. I think it's great that Stoker could make us doubt what we know, just with his writing. If the whole book had been like this, I'd have read it in a day and given it 5 stars.As it is, I struggled to get through it. Chapters are HUGE and some diary entries, especially halfway through the book are anywhere from 8-16 pages long. It's not easy to just pick this up at night and only read a little, or a chapter at a time. Once I pick it up, I usually end up spending two hours reading it, and even then I'm making very little headway percentage wise. It is taking FOREVER to read. If I were an immortal vampire, I wouldn't mind, but I have other things to do so it's a bit annoying.Once Mina and Lucy got introduced to the story and Jonathan disappeared, my interest waned quite a bit. She and Lucy were not nearly as interesting as Jonathan was. Their diary entries were clearly written by the same hand as Jonathan's, despite their being different characters and the whole love square with Lucy was boring. I didn't like this part of the book at all, which probably amounted for a good 25% after the Jonathan storyline.Once we started getting introduced to Lucy's suitors thing got marginally better. I really liked Dr Seward and his psychiatric patient Renfield, who really seemed to keep the intrigue and my attention. They were both really interesting and written in a completely different way. I was, however, very pleased that I'd studied Victorian medicine at Uni because it helped a little in understanding half of the gobbledegook that they talked about. Renfield was a particularly favourite character of mine because he was so complex, and because in the end, I really managed to connect with him and his situation.The news entries and telegram notices were nice little touches and they made for quick five/ten minute reading during my writing breaks or when out and about. However, my really big issue with this story is the way that accents are written. It's considered quite a big no-no in this day and age, because people find it hard to read. Well, someone should have told Stoker that. The guy from the Zoo was just ridiculous reading and I really struggled to understand half of what Van Helsing was saying when he first go introduced to the story.I don't like giving spoilers, but it seems that I'm about one of the only people on earth, over a certain age that hasn't read this book before. So let me say that I think the whole group of men: Jonathan, Dr Seward, Van Helsing, Art and Quincy are a bunch of morons, if they didn't think to even stop and wonder as to the safety of Mina Harker, while they were off playing the Heroes of the story. Let's face it, it was almost exactly the same thing that happened to Lucy. They left her, claiming she was safe and things got a Hell of a lot worse for her. But they continued to leave her, just as with Mina, and eventually she died. Big shock there. I do, however, understand that Jonathan blamed it all on stress whenever he noticed how pale and tired she was since he hadn't been around to see the deterioration of Lucy. But if he had just once mentioned it to the others, then surely with their experience with Lucy, they would have known what was going on and helped out.I will say this ? during reading this book, I was undecided as to how I was going to rate it. Until Jonathan's story ended it was a solid 5 stars. After the whole d?b?cle with Lucy and Mina, I lowered it to 2.5 stars. By the time I was a little more than halfway through the book, this had gone up to 3 stars. The intense last 20% of the book managed to scrape up another .5 of a star, to bump it up to 3 ? stars. Sadly, the disappointing ending stole that .5 and put it back to a 3 star.To be quite honest, I could see half of this book or so getting chopping out and leaving it a much better story. The first 60%, apart from Jonathan's brief encounter at the beginning, was very slow and drawn out. I get that it's to be suggestive, to leave you wondering, but I could easily have missed reading the whole Lucy part of the story and still been quite happy with the book as a whole.At the end of this book I can safely say that Jonathan began, remained and ended as my favourite character. Renfield was a close second with Van Helsing and Dr Seward following in the queue. The girls, sadly, didn't even merit top 10 positions in my favourite characters. They were insipid, self-obsessed at times, more interested in their own love lives than what was going on around them and frankly, uninteresting the entire way through the book. I didn't have any sympathy for Lucy when she died and I didn't have any sympathy for Mina, for getting herself hooked up with the Count.Overall, a decent book with a good story. It was far too long winded for my liking, took too long to get to the point and the ending was disappointingly anti-climactic.

My measure of a great book of suspense is whether or not it reads well out loud, and if that's a good criteria, I think this book succeeds admirably. ((I grew up with folks telling ghost stories around campfires, trying to scare each other.)) Folks might argue that _Frankenstein_ is the more thought-provoking book, but this one scares me on a primal level.

Constantly long-winded but I enjoyed how it was narrated from different people through their diary entries or letters. The author's writing was skillful.

Read through immersion reading.
Wonderful performances by Alan Cummings and Tim Curry

Great beginning, but shortly after events switch to London the writing descends into tedious and poorly written melodrama and just plain bad dialogue (especially Van Helsing's). The Virtue of Manliness! The horror of female carnality! The constant weeping! The expressive nostrils! The latter half of the book is like one long cornpone homily intermixed with, dear my friends, an absurd amount of regurgitation, the manly weeping, and the nostrils of deep feeling. Terrible.

Excellent audio version!!! The voice actors did a remarkable job!

A good story told by a bad story tellerI didn't like the writing style (sometimes I was catching myself falling asleep during reading). The main characters seemed to be very superficial, the story is developing really slowly and as a bonus it has disappointing ending.

After reading for 55+ years, I thought it about time to read the "real" Dracula and I'm glad I did.The book is intriguing and suspensful without being gory or bloody. A lot of history about Dracula is given and also explains why he does what he does. The book is written as diary entries by all the major characters; gives great perspective.The only negative comment is that some of the journal entries use less than proper grammar (he has brain of child, he weak, etc. This detracts from the otherwise well-written book.

I loved the different voices that made up this audiobook. What a classic!

This is a very good rendition of Dracula for the young adult. It's not the full version. It has been adapted for the young reader. I remember getting this book as a kid and I remember it putting terror into me.

I highly recommend this book for the young reader. The print is a decent size. It has the correct mixture of pictures and words to keep the young reader interested.

What can I say that hasn't already been said about Dracula? It's a classic for a reason. I first read this book many years ago and had forgotten all of the little details of the story. So while reviews have already been written many times over, I will say this:Wilhelmina, if you can believe it, is more progressive as a female heroine in the book than how she is portrayed in films or television. In the book, she never falls in love or is smitten by Dracula. From the moment she realizes what he is and what he has done, she is repulsed and disgusted by him. She fears and loathes Dracula, and never fully succumbs to his will. He turned her best friend into one of the Un-dead, she cannot imagine a worse fate. Lucy's death, and the safety of her own immortal soul are what drives her to find Dracula. Thus, Dr. Van Helsing, her husband, and all of the other gentlemen in The Campaign, consider her a vital member of the team. They consistently stress in their journals and memorandums that she is brave, strong, and a steadfast rock in times of crisis. Her optimism and hope often keep the team from falling into doubt. She is a "train-fiend," and aids the men in the chase after Dracula with her knowledge of train schedules. She also gathered together, in order, all notes, journal entries and clues concerning Dracula in order to track him down. This was no easy feat and absolutely brilliant as Van Helsing gladly admits. There are times when the men leave Mina in the dark concerning The Plan of Campaign for fear of her sanity and well-being, but they soon realize that they cannot accomplish the deed without her assistance. Thus Mina Harker has become one of my favorite characters in classic literature, a far cry from being a helpless victim.

The grandfather of all modern vampire fiction - what more can you say

This was a surprisingly enjoyable read, even for those who aren't into vampires or horror fiction or reading the "classics". I read it based on a recommendation from a friend, and because I like epistolary novels (novels where the story is told in the form of diary entries or letters, etc). I am not really into vampires, but this was very enjoyable -- the writing was very descriptive and the characters well drawn, so it was easy to visualize the action in your head. It was also neat to read one of the "original" vampire stories and see where a lot of modern vampire works draw their influence from. There are a lot of notes, to help readers understand foreign terms, literary allusions and other things that would (hopefully) have been common knowledge in 1897. This particular edition, by Penguin Classics, had the notes at the end of the book, rather than the bottom of each page, for those who have a preference in such things. Highly recommended for fans of great writing, historical fiction or movie buffs.

I can't believe it's taken me so long to finally read Dracula. I'd gotten it into my head that it would be boring, I suppose, but it was not at all boring. It's scary. All the little tricks you expect in horror now -- seeing flashes of a face outside a window, hearing a scream, trapping someone in a room -- they're actually legit scary. The book is more complex than I realized too, with five or six diarists telling the story. It creates a spooky, intelligent atmosphere as you compare what each person is saying. Not a modern "unreliable narrator" story, but something that creates a kind of reality since more than one person is saying it. Well-written in general, with excellent plotting and pacing, and y'all know I'm a stickler for that. It's slow, but again that lends itself to the realism of travel and planning in that era. And, although sometimes coincidence intervenes, and the group was unbelievably dumb to not give Mina garlic etc. the first time she's excluded from their plans, other than that it's not stupid horror-movie stuff that gets everyone into trouble. Some of the symbolism is obvious... It's a book about the power of Christianity restoring order to the world. It's a book nervously asserting heterosexuality and whiteness. Other parts seem a little more complex -- the book's relationship to science and scientists, for instance. The role of Renfield, which was not at all what I expected either. Deeply enjoyed both reading and having read this classic, and looking forward to more research into its historical/literary role as well as its adaptations.

"Dracula" is the classic vampie tale from 1897, a mix of mystery and adventure, full of gentlemanly huffing and puffing and unironic sexism.This abridged but digitally-enhanced version of Dracula starts off well: The interactive elements got me to read closer and the plot is strongest when it's in single-protagonist mode. But towards the middle, momentum wears off, and the novelty of interactivity turns into a minor annoyance -- there are only so many pages where I could stand having the text legibility tampered with. Yet it does show promise -- some moments work, and really do help modernize the 1897 classic.

The story, told in an epistolary format, of infamous Count Dracula's attempt to settle in England, and the battle to thwart this attempt, and finish the vampire, by a small group of righteous people, led by equally well-known Professor Abraham Van Helsing. I've seen numerous film-versions based on this story, but this is the first time I've managed to get through the original and I must say it's absolutely fantastic. There isn't much new to say about the actual story since most people are fully aware of what a great and monumental literary masterpiece it is, but I must note that the (unabridged) full-cast audio-version with Alan Cumming and Tim Curry is absolutely excellent and highly, highly recommended.

(original review date on my website was 10-5-08)I finished Dracula on audio this week and loved it. Now my sons and husband are listening to it as well. The unabridged edition, of course. It is creepy and scary, and I normally don’t like creepy and scary, but Bram Stoker’s novel is so well done and, obviously, the beginning of it all. I’m thinking of getting this annotated edition at left that comes out on October 13. It even has an introduction by Neil Gaiman. I’ll probably use this edition for a future re-read.We started to watch the movie starring Gary Oldman, but it wasn’t appropriate for kids (my kids at least) so we quit. I still may watch it at a later date. I would love to see a modern version that was faithful to the book.Something that surprised and pleased me while reading the book was the strong Christian faith of some of the characters. I didn’t expect that at all, and I do wonder about Stoker’s own beliefs. He was rumored to have been part of a secret, magical order that included the occultist Aleister Crowley.Also, I read on Publisher’s Weekly that Bram Stoker’s great-grandnephew Dacre Stoker and Dracula documentarian and historian Ian Holt are going to be writing Dracula: the Undead. The publisher will be Dutton, and it is scheduled to be released in October, 2009.

This book has been on my list of books to read for many years now, primarily because it's a 'horror' classic. Having read all of the vampire books by Anne Rice and being a huge fan of her writing style and her version of 'vampires' I have been reluctant to read any other books about vampires.I know that Bram Stoker is the inspiration behind many of the vampire books today, but I imagined the book was going to be outdated and as unbearable as the old black and white film 'Dracula'. In the way that Edgar Allan Poe was well known for his 'ghost stories' in his time, when you read his stories now, they're far from spooky. So you can imagine that I was shocked and excited to discover that despite being published in 1897, the novel is still quite creepy by today's standards.I also didn't know that this classic novel is a compilation of letters and journal entries from the main characters. I thought that jumping from character to character and letter to journal without a sole narrator could hamper the pace of the plot but it actually enhanced the story and helped to build the suspense.All in all, I really enjoyed 'Dracula', and I can understand why it is a classic.

Reread on audio. The best part is the first section, when Jonathan Harker is in Dracula's castle. The horror imagery is fantastic: Dracula climbing head-first down the sheer side of his castle; the three women gathered around the sack that contains a child; the wolves howling. Stoker maybe should have stopped here, because after Dracula moves to London, the novel really bogs down. The prose acquires a decidedly purplish tint, and Van Helsing is oftentimes nothing less than ridiculous. The genteel Victorian sexism starts to grate, and really, it is just too long to wait before the final hunt, which feels a little anticlimactic after all the build-up.I'm still rating this 5* because Dracula is a book that spawned a thousand imitators and really helped create modern horror. It is worthwhile going back and reading these novels that spawned the tropes, even with their now-apparent flaws.I listened to an ensemble cast version with Tim Curry as Van Helsing, which was nicely done. Curry didn't have a big enough part. He was the only reader who didn't make Van Helsing's accent sound ridiculous.

Well, it's Dracula. What more do I really need to say, right? :-)Written back in the 19th century when things were left more to the imagination (which can think up way more horrifying things than anything written), I prefer this to any other novel on vampires that I've read.

I've never actually seen any Dracula movies but I've seen and read my fair share of vampires in general. They seem to be popular in fiction these days. I know this book has been on my mental list of books to eventually read but no need to really soon for years. Then I watched the movie 'League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' the other week and it made a reference to Dracula. For some reason that cause me to transfer the book to my actual 'to read' list. And so when I saw it on the library shelves’ audio books section I decided now was as good a time as any to read it, or rather listen to it. I didn't really know what to expect so there was no disappointments of any kind. It was a fairly entertaining book really. I'm glad I got to it since it is a classic, but I will most likely not read it again. I really liked the beginning of the book, but the middle seemed to drag a little for me and the end seemed slightly rushed. But the beginning was fantastic. I wasn't sure the book would succeed in the 'creepy' since 'creepy' in the 1800s might have been different from the 'creepy' of today, but there were parts that may have caused a shudder. I believe it was the writing style that allowed this. The book was an 'okay' for me. It was slightly less than a "I sincerely like it". But I am glad I got to it. I do think any reader should get into some classics at some point in their life. If for nothing else, to see and debate on why they are considered classics. :)

Dracula by Bram Stoker.my thoughts and comments:The Count is definitely a book of another time, but that didn't stop me from enjoying it. I expected it to be creepier, but as I was yet a teenager the last time I read it, it most likely affected me very differently. I enjoyed the characters in the story. I found it a little long winded at times, but books of that era pretty much are so I am not complaining, just commenting. I would have liked to see more little underlying stories but I thought it quite good and will give it another read in a few more years with a newer different copy.

I love this book. The imagery relayed through the articles, letters and diaries of the main characters lets you experience the times and the horror of the circumstances that each is put in. Most notably, Mina and Jonathan Harker along with Dr. Seward all keep detailed recordings of their day to day excursions through happiness and terror. And though Professor Van Helsing bungles at times, they wouldn't have had a chance without his leadership and advanced knowledge of the arcane and paranormal. Meanwhile Lord Godalming and Quincey Morris complete the team like courageous and true gentlemen of the day. Dracula does move about during the day at times and he has a moustache which is a bit odd, but the maniacal lure of his beautifully vampiric victims and his dreadful scenes with Jonathan and Mina leave you rejoicing that you're not, as of yet, one of the Un-Dead.
Victorian Gothic at it's best.

Just finished the San Diego Library's read-aloud for Halloween. With all the modern re-interpretations of vampire lore, it's interesting to read the one that started it all (nod to Nosferatu). It shows its age but holds up well with many truly creepy passages that have never been surpassed.

I liked it but not nearly as much as I thought I would. There were some parts that were very intense and I'm certainly happy that I picked it up and read it.