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Welcome... to My Library

Updated: Oct 13, 2021

Enter freely. Go safely, and leave something of the happiness you bring.


It's October, aka the lead in to one of the best holidays of the year (maybe the best, we'll put it up for consideration), and that means Dracula! The books, the movies, the history, the icon - Dracula looms large in culture this time of year. To be honest he lives rent free in my brain all the time - he'll sleep like a lazybones most of the year to wake and shake the cage of my skull near the end of September - by October 1st, it's all Dracula all the time.


Time to confess, the Dracula I first knew and adored was not Bram Stoker's - it's was Elizabeth Kostova's Dracula from The Historian. This Dracula was terrifying, romantic, and (most importantly) a bibliophile in desperate need of a librarian! That's right, the entire plot of The Historian is to find a worthy librarian for Dracula's personal library. Imagine, a library curated by one incredible (if highly alarming) mind for centuries! Seriously, you need to listen to the audiobook, when the narrator reads Dracula waxing poetic about books - it's genuine love. This is the stuff of librarian daydreams. Ignore the creepy pasta of the vampire weirdness (or not it totally adds to the aesthetic) - we're talking unique books, rare books, old books, and the chance to speak with the mind that drew them together.


Do you need more convincing to read this book? Okay, look at these quotes:


"It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home.”


Come on, this is what it feels like!


"When you handle books all day long, every new one is a friend and a temptation."


Seriously, super tempting to hide in the stacks with the cool kids (books = the coolest of the cool).


"You are a total stranger and you want to take my library book."


You're done, touch the book and it'll be the last thing you do.


Still not convinced? Okay, how about a sweet story? The Historian is dedicated to Kostova's father, an academic who started to tell her versions of the Dracula stories when he and the family moved to Slovenia. (1) In The Historian you have a teenage girl running all over Europe learning about Dracula trying to find and save her father. I wonder where she got that idea...


But, it's soooo long! No, no it's not - this book is exactly as long as it needs to be. If The Historian was any shorter it would be rushed and highly unpleasant. It's a book for readers and who are you? You're a reader! Top notch, grade A reader - that's you! (Besides, you can listen to the audiobook or read it. Options, options - no excuses!)


So, we have a rich setting (see post WWII Europe), a book loving weirdo bent on world domination (Dracula), and a library in need of a librarian (the main feature); toss in trains, a mystery, and one teenage girl sans father and you have The Historian. This is a love letter to books and libraries masquerading as a horror novel. This book is as perfect as it gets. I could go on and on, but we'll wrap it up with this: go read this book, you won't regret it.


What are you still doing here? Get the book!




(1) Bigger than Dan Brown by Gary Younge from The Guardian (2005)

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/jul/18/fiction.news



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