Bakker Bugle Blog

I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul. God keep me, if only for the sake of those dear to me! …

Safety and the assurance of safety are things of the past. Whilst I live on here there is but one thing to hope for, that I may not go mad, if, indeed, I be not mad already. … For now, feeling as though my own brain were unhinged or as if the shock had come which must end in its undoing, I turn to my diary for repose. The habit of entering accurately must help to soothe me.

Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, begins with a series of diary entries from the journal of one Jonathan Harker, who travelled to the Carpathian mountains to provide legal services for a certain Count Dracula. I humbly suggest that we follow him.

Bram Stoker was born in Clontarf, just outside of Dublin, and began his career while living in a house not far from our own. For April 2009, Dracula was the required reading for One City, One Book, as sponsored by the Dublin City Public Libraries. (I fondly remember the One Book, One Chicago program from a few years ago, and I rejoiced in the adoption of similar programs by smaller library districts like Warren-Newport Public Library.) There is a tourist attraction in Dublin called The Bram Stoker Dracula Experience — but I have yet to visit it.

Now, a book-binder named Whitney Sorrow is publishing the book as a blog. Hold on, hold on — this makes a lot of sense. Dracula is an epistolary novel, and Ms Sorrow will release each entry on the appropriate date, one-hundred-and-some years after the dates of the original book. So we readers will experience the events of the story at about the same pace as they unfolded in the (probably imaginary) timeline of the novel.

The project began May 3rd. So if you catch up now, there’s enough content to get you interested and hopefully subscribed to the blog’s feed. After that, it takes just a few minutes a day to keep up.

(If you need help with RSS feeds, shoot me an email or ask in the comments below. You can read along without using RSS, but it really is something you should learn anyway.)

I started on May 7th, and so far, the format works very well for me. (Today’s entry mentioned dates with an eerie parallel to our move to Luxembourg.) I’ve started Dracula a few times in years gone by, and I admit that this is the first time that I haven’t put down the story after a few pages.

So, dear readers, join me in reading Dracula! Let’s use the comments for this blog post to talk about the book so far. No spoilers past the current date, please.