It’s 10/10/10! Such dates only occur about nine times each millennium, according to my friend Roger’s research.

I found the image above on Flickr. It’s a cross outside Bran Castle in Transylvania—Dracula’s castle. I’m still reading and very much enjoying Syrie James’s Dracula, My Love. I read Dracula last year (read my review here) as part of the R.I.P. Challenge, although I didn’t finish it in time to count it (November 8). And now I’m reading Dracula paraliterature for this year’s challenge! One of the things I wondered about was whether Stoker’s choice to tell the story in an epistolary fashion would have altered if he’d chosen a character from whose point of view to tell it. I like James’s choice of Mina Harker. The novel has been great so far! I haven’t caught any departures from Stoker’s novel aside from the ways in which point of view always alters the story. Syrie James’s Dracula is much more seductive—more like our current school of thought on vampires (Lestat, Louis de Pointe du Lac, Edward Cullen, and the like) than Nosferatu. I do enjoy how James turns Professor Van Helsing into something of an ass. That’s fun.

Aside from Syrie James’s take on Dracula, I haven’t read much. I have been enormously busy at work and grad school. It’s not that I don’t have time to read—I do—it’s just that with all the extra work, the time I do have is often at the end of the day when I’m tired.

I still haven’t started Jamaica Inn. If I don’t start that one soon, there’s no way I can count it toward the R.I.P. Challenge, although when I finish Dracula, My Love, I will have completed four books, so anything else I read is gravy.

Isn’t the R.I.P. Challenge is the best way to spend October every year? September never really feels like fall in Georgia, but starting the R.I.P. Challenge gets me into the spirit, so to speak. However, by October, when our leaves are changing and temperatures are falling, reading creepy books feel great. Thanks so much Carl for hosting it every year and always making it such a highlight in terms of reading experiences.

Some of my blogging peers are talking about the big readathon this weekend. I can’t participate in that kind of thing during the school year, or I will be dead come Monday. And I can’t be dead and teach teenagers how to appreciate Geoffrey Chaucer and Arthur Miller. However, I really want to try one over the summer. Anyone know of one? Or do we just need to throw that shindig ourselves?

In other completely unrelated news, I got a haircut (click to embiggen, as Wil Wheaton always says):

photo credit: VSELLIS