The Castle of Otranto

The Castle of Otranto
Horace Walpole, 1764

I'm not quite finished, but what with the band concert tonight and me having to get this blog done by tomorrow, I don't think I can make it. So I'll just blog about what I've read thus far.

One thing that really bothers me about the book is that there aren't quotations around characters' lines. It's kinda hard to understand who is saying what. But other than that, I'm pretty surprised to find that I can understand what's going on in the story fairly easily. (Unlike last year when we had to read Herman Melville's Billy Budd. I read about fifty pages and realized that the only thing I was positive had happened was that someone had spilled some soup....)

This book, however, is pretty easy to get into. The only part that really confused me ('cept for the lack of "") was in the very beginning when Manfred's son, Conrad, was killed by a giant helmet that fell from the sky.... Or at least, I think it did...... That might be where I'm getting confused.....

And I'm still going to finish the book even though I am now done with all my blogs! ^-^

The Historian (finale)

I stayed up late Sunday night to finish, but I did it! And I must say, it was a pretty good book.

I was right when I predicted that Helen was the narrator's mother. I mean, it's just too coincidental that her father would be hanging out with a woman named Helen that's not the girl's mother. What are the chances?

The epilogue was kind of sad though. Her father is killed by a land mine, and Barley isn't mentioned, so I really don't know whether he and the girl got married or whatever. But the girl gets a dragon book of her own, so that's kind of interesting.

Another thing, I mentioned that the book was titled The Historian because Paul became a historian in search of Dracula. But really, it's Dracula himself that is the historian. He has a really huge, hidden library full of rare books about torture, folklore, and even biographies of himself.

The Historian (part 8) and still no internet....

I read a lot over the Thanksgiving break, but still haven't finished the book. I'm over half way done though and things are really starting to get interesting. I've realized a couple of things as I read:

1. I probably should have read Dracula first. It's mentioned a lot in The Historian and I don't always get the references. In a passage I read last night, more letters from Rossi were found with Helen's mother. In them, he says how he and a guide made their way up to an abandoned fortress reconstructed by Vlad the Impaler, and how he almost wished they had gone at night so that he might see fires erupting from the ground and the packs of wolves encircling the wagon just as Jonathan Harker had seen on his way to Count Dracula's castle. (Luckily, I had read that part, so I understood the Dracula allusions.)

2. As I had predicted, Helen is a descendant of Vlad Tepes. Paul often says how she reminds him of Vlad throughout the story ever since Turgut showed them his life-size portrait of the man in Istanbul. With the appearance of Rossi's letters, my suspicions were confirmed.

Hopefully, I'll finish this book by the weekend and have internet again as well...