I had super-high expectations when it came to reading The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. I was loving the creepy, Victorian/Gothic vibes as well as the idea that a painting was aging while the model remained ageless. (Hope I didn’t spoil anything, but at this point I feel like everyone knows at least…
It took me a year to read Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I started it last October and got really bored and then the season passed. This year, I finished it, but not without some pushing. Dracula is a classic of Gothic horror, an original in many senses and the bulwark of the vampire genre. I thought…
Did you know that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (technically Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) is a short story? A novella, at best? The version I read (a trade paperback volume by Signet Classics containing an introduction by Stephen King and also Dracula and Frankenstein) runs to 75 pages. Which makes this…
The genius of Jane Austen aside, I have to admit that this story held very few surprises for me. Thanks to movies, cultural allusions, and adaptations, I read this book feeling very much like I had read it already. Several times. And yet… There is a reason Austen’s six novels (she died too early!) are…
Rarely do I listen to a book as opposed to pick up a physical copy and read it with my eyeballs. (Almost never do I read with my eyes a digital copy.) The exceptions to this rule are two: one, when I have a migraine and I am laying there bored out of my mind…
the starving artist 