I’m a child at heart, and I get into the silliest things.
Apologies aside, I think it was Eco who went on and on about ‘the reading experience‘, and how there are so many different factors of things that affect our reading. Eco was around for the early stages of the eReader, and I am sure he had opinions about how that technology mediated our reading experience. I am also reasonably sure I have already read that essay, and promptly forgotten it.
So, surprise! This isn’t actually a review of Dracula. Because I will at least in part talk about Dracula Daily.
Dracula needs no introduction as far as the story itself. But in case you didn’t know, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is an epistolary novel – that being a novel where each chapter is a letter being sent from one character to another. And so some bright person set up a free Substack where you receive the letters in your actual email inbox on the day that is dated on each chapter of the book. It goes from May 3rd to November 7th.
I thought it was a really fun idea. I am glad I chose this avenue to consume the book. But I feel like it did effect my reading.
I signed up for it and, largely, forgot about it till May 3rd, when a participating friend messaged me to let me know it was going on. I was out in the city when the message came, and I took a five minute break from my day to sit on a park bench and read the first letter. On the second day, the email popped up right as I opened my laptop, and I set to work on it immediately. Initially, it was easy for me to get into a rhythm of opening up my email app and finding the latest Dracula Daily to read. But just as I had gotten used to it Jonathan Harker et all fuck off and stop writing for a pretty significant bit, and I promptly forgot about it. For me, reading is very much a daily habit until a book sucks me in so hard that I make additional time for it. But conversely, if a book leaves me alone for weeks on end with nothing to do, I am going to disengage with it. Yes, I should have thought about this before starting to read Dracula in this format, but I wasn’t aware that was going to happen.
Format dictates a reading experience. This format made the reading experience significantly worse for some of the days. Later on in the narrative, people are writing massive letters and journal entries, and there are multiple people writing things on the same day. They all arrive to you in the same email, and there is a weird sense of obligation to read it all in one sitting. That wasn’t fun, and I ended up feeling very annoyed at these sections and the pressure they put on me. In another format, I might have read that ‘day’ over many other days. But I here, I felt obliged to read Oct 1st on October 1st.
I still think this was a cute idea. I am glad I did it. But given the opportunity again, I might not.
Failures in Polymathy 