Books Thread

[Eban]

Selco Begovic - The dark secrets of SHTF survival

[kojack]

On 1/21/2023 at 3:09 PM, Hertzian56 said:

I was adding a books thread here, anything about books really, which ones you like, are reading etc Links to ones if you like, tons of free ebooks on gutenberg, archive.org and all over the internet etc, reviews, etc etc wide open. I have a handful of physical ones now, used to have a sizable store on scamazon and had a large collection myself but moving and mobility made me discard most of them and just keep to special and rare ones in my physical library. I've had an old 7" Samsung Tab 3 for reading ebooks only for years, thousands of books in epub, pdf, txt etc forms. All on a 32gb microsd. I use Moon+ reader app.

 

I just finished the original Dracula last night from a gutenberg epub and since I also have watched the so called "bram stokers dracula" by the coppolamafia I just wanted to mention the messages they added in that are not in the book at all. Stoker, if still alive, would probably sue them for putting his name on it and it's a blatant fraud to do so. Similar to what is presented as history by paid for experts.

 

First of all Mina is NOT some reincarnated lost love of Dracula as shown in the movie, dracula does NOT get the way he is by the cursing and renouncing as shown in the first 5mins of the movie, it's not clear how he got that way in the book but that he comes from a long line of invaders guerilla warfare and is somehow connected to Atilla the Hun ancestry. So there is no link to fighting Muslim invaders, Mongol invaders and such shown in the movies prologue. I don't think Dracula was ever Christian to begin with nor his ancestors so the crusader stuff is falsehood. There is never any romance sequences in London between Mina and Dracula etc

 

In the book Mina describes Dracula as a criminal with a criminals childlike materialistic mind and slave of habit/pavlovian, as does Van Helsing in his memos. Dracula is never presented as the tragic figure as in the movie who is some good guy underneath. There is no final battle other than the chase to beat Dracula to his stronghold castle in the remaining native coffin of earth from TRANS-sylvania, they catch him and dispatch him. And there is other stuff that Van Helsing does at the castle before then that would prevent Dracula from triumphing anyways. Mina is just bitten by Dracula and is slowly turning into one of his slaves but Van Helsing and the others have ways of delaying it until they dispatch Dracula, freeing the ones that are in process of turning and have not died yet. In the so called "host" cut of the movie(another subtle insult) reincarnated Mina and her love go into the castle and you see the end with some priests absolving or something. I think the release version just showed the final actions by reincarnated Mina to dispatch her love etc. Renfield is NOT a former employee that previously went to Draculas castle for the same business that Jonathan did in the book, the movie puts that in and really it makes some sense to do so otherwise how does Renfield have a specific link to Dracula? Idk maybe I missed that, I admit the long winded expositions got pretty tedious so I did skim a bit.

 

The early part with Jonathan in Draculas castle is the best part of the book and really of the movie but much better in the book, very suspenseful and more complete for obvious reasons.

 

The book is over long and gets a bit too ponderous with expositions all over, similar to frankenstein which I also recently read. Seems to be a problem with romantic era literature what we'd call monster classics now. I liked the movie don't get me wrong and there is a lot of dialogue and other things true to the book but there is almost as much added on stuff to serve other purposes.

What a great thread.  We are re arranging our house now. Turning my current office into a library / reading room.  Taking my oldest's bedroom/living room/walk in closet and converting it into a media creation room for our new videos, podcast and more, putting my office out there for editing and writing, and making the closet into a printing, business supplies storage and equipment room.   We were into chapters this weekend and picked out about 50 books to start our collection in the library.  

 

Even the smell of books are great.  I am glad there are more in here interested in actual books than reading off the screen all the time.  Our library is going to be a dark and moody design with nice lighting, a rug, table with 2 comfortable chairs and a built in seat to fit two other people in the book shelf unit.  that way we can have a board game night in there too with our family. 

[crz]

I do not think that everything was exactly as the author describes, but it is extremely difficult to establish the truth looking into the depths of centuries...

 

[Jarhead]

Put a pause on the other books I mentioned in this thread as I'm waiting for the English translations to be released. In the meanwhile, I've been reading The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten series (finished volume 5.5, need to get around to grabbing the rest) and I paused reading Spice and Wolf after finishing volume 6.

[ryan]

Sleight of Mouth - The Magic of Conversational Belief Change