Now that I'm rereading Dracula, I thought I would once again have Steve Donoghue as a reading companion.
This is from a read-along that Steve did last year with two other booktubers. So Steve is only reading a third of the book himself. We start here with chapter 3 (the other booktubers did chapter 1 and chapter 2).
I've briefly checked in with the other Youtubers, and it looks like they are just doing a straight read-aloud without any commentary. So, with apologies, I'll be skipping their videos, and just joining in for Steve's chapters.
In the past, I used to make a habit of listening to youtube audiobooks of whatever I was reading at the time as a way to help me absorb the book better. I would use the youtube audio to review the chapters I had already read. But I stopped doing that this year because I wanted to focus my listening time on my podcast projects. (My progress on The Revolutions Podcast has been painfully slow. It's time to devote more listening time to working through my podcasts.) So this year I've been trying to prioritize working through the podcasts instead. So if the other booktubers are just going to be plain read-alouds, I'll skip over them. Plus, as I mentioned in my started post, I've already done Dracula as an audio book once already.
But Steve's commentary I think really enriches the book, so I'll tune in for Steve. I be listening to Steve's videos after I finish each chapter. I've finished chapter 3 now, so I'll post Steve's video.
I love the way Steve makes fun of the prose in this book as he reads it. It made me chuckle a few times.
It also helped me to set my own bearings. I mean, I also found the prose in Dracula to be a bit of a slog at times, but then I frequently find 19th century books to be a bit of a slog. (The Victorian prose style was much different than today's style, after all.) So I assumed that any trouble I had getting into the style of the book must be just because of the older style.
Steve Donoghue, however, reads tons of Victorian era books, so he has an ear for what was considered good prose for the time, and what was considered bad prose. And he's able to point out Bram Stoker's bad prose in a very amusing way.
From 25:13 Let's go back to what I'm sure Bram Stoker thought of as a sentence written in English . "Here I am, sitting at a little oak table where in old times possibly some fair lady sat to pen, with much thought and many blushes, her ill-spelt love-letter, and writing in my diary in shorthand all that has happened since I closed it last." Uh, he's writing a love letter and the lady from ages past is writing in his diary.
Ha!
my impression is people thought the book badly written even back in the day. It's one of those "Great concept beats horrible execution" scenarios
...anyway, the full read along is here. I'll only be watching Steve's videos, and I'll watch them after I've finished reading those chapters, and then posting them here on this blog as I watch them.
Steve has also done a lot of other videos on his channel in which he talks about Dracula. (Steve just does a lot of videos full stop.) But this one in particular is also worth watching, if you're interested. Lots of useful background information about Bram Stoker and his legacy:
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