We’re still about a month and a half out, but given all the current bookclubs I thought it might be prudent to ask now. Dracula Daily will be starting up again soon, and I was curious if there were enough folks interested in following along in a foreign language to make it worth putting up an informal book club thread for it. @DIO-Berry and I did it last year in Japanese, and I had a really good time. While I don’t think I’ll be reading Dracula again in Japanese (at least this year), I don’t mind setting up and maintaining a thread if there are others interested. And Dracula’s popular/old enough that I’m sure it’s got a translation in most major languages, so if someone wanted to read in a language not represented on Natively, that’d easily be possible as well.
What’s Dracula Daily?
DD is a fun yearly event set up by Matt Kirkland, where he emails out chunks of Dracula to be read over a period of about 7 months. Dracula is written in an epistolary style, and each entry in the book is dated, allowing us to read along as the characters write.
This means that you may read a page of text on day XX, a paragraph the next day, then ten pages eight days after that. One benefit to this is that you get to follow along chronologically, as opposed to how the original book sometimes structures things. You also get to wait in suspense with characters as they wait or investigate.
What level would you recommend being to try this?
I’d recommend being comfortable with around level ~30 books, at least in Japanese. You can probably score some wiggle room depending on your own personal familiarity with Dracula and how the translator of your particular edition translated it, but somewhere around L30 should be a decent benchmark to gauge with. Here’s my review of the JP edition I read; please note this is only one of several translations, and difficulty will vary according to that.
Any other thoughts?
The event runs from May 3 to November 7. You can jump in and out any time, and read how things work best for you. For example, last year I read about half in Japanese and half in English; I got to a point at the end of it all where I was way too busy to read the daily entry and be able to keep up, so I took that into account.
As a general note, you can generally expect entry length and density to be lighter in the earlier parts of the challenge, and heavier near the end. The last few months in particular I remember having quite a bit of text, and as mentioned above, sometimes had to swap languages if I wanted to keep up.
- Yes
- No
- Not Sure
