if you were to run away and join the circus/carnival/fairground, what role do you think you would have? and then maybe we can suggest book recs based on what we chose?

i think i would be someone who runs the games that you win prizes at, and Twilight Eyes' main character did that, so that's my rec.

Everything I discuss here is based on the publicly known details about Dracula, so I’m not marking it for spoilers, but proceed with caution if you know nothing about who Dracula is. Also, please keep in mind the lack of a spoiler tag when responding!

I can’t help but think about how our experience reading this today, even if we know nothing about the actual story, is forever altered by the lore and legends built over time after this book came out. You’d probably be hard pressed to find someone nowadays who doesn’t already know that Dracula is a vampire. And obviously, if you read the blurb for the book on here, you’d learn that before reading as well.

That makes this reading experience so fundamentally different when compared to that of someone who read it shortly after its release. My basic understanding is that while this certainly wasn’t the first vampire story, it also wasn’t widely known that Dracula was a vampire until you actually read the book. So I’m curious to know what the experience must have been like to learn with Harker (and I assume the other characters later in the book) what Dracula is. Instead, we go into this with more information than the narrator and I don’t think that was the original intent. I definitely could be wrong though haha

I’ll be researching this as I read more I think and come back to update, but for any Dracula lovers or English majors out there, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

”Eating with the seasons is a way of honoring abundance. By going to meet it when and where it arrives. A world of produce houses and grocery stores enables the practice of having what you want and when you want it”

My mom once said to me, "I only eat food that comes from the store, not from the ground." When the shock subsided and I could finally form words again, I asked, genuinely curious, where she thought the food from the store came from. She told me that she knows it comes from the ground but she doesn't have to see it so it's different. Different in the same way that people couldn't fathom killing a cow but would happily eat a burger. (I'm not judging, nor am I absolved of the hypocrisy - I eat fish). But the point is we are so far removed from reality that we could never even fathom not having our favorite foods available every single day of the year. And yet there is still such a terrible scarcity mindset. "If I don't buy it now, if I don't have it now, I may never get the opportunity to again!" This way of life carries over into every aspect of our lives and creates an atmosphere of constantly living for the future rather than living for what we currently have.