Carlos A Torres – Designer & Photographer

Bram Stoker has kept me company for a couple of weeks now and the affiliation is finally over. I picked up Dracula a few weeks back so I could finally read this literary classic of macabre storytelling and was pleasantly surprised that the Coppola film took many liberties but that both pieces of art, as book and film, are actually each worthy in their own merit. The book is told as a series of diaries from all the different characters (the same characters as seen in the film) save for an account from the Count himself. The story is very linear and written in an extremely classical style by Stoker. The book is somewhat anti-climactic, as the film had added drama for support in comparison but it was thoroughly enjoyable. The film centers around the Love Never Dies theme, which is absent from the book. This was obviously added to give the film more dimension than the linearity of the book and in my opinion it worked well to give the film a driving storyline. All in all, kudos to Bram Stoker for his classic and kudos to Francis Ford Coppola for bringing the book to life in a very stylized, modern take on the old Count. Do yourself a favor and read the book and watch the film if you haven’t done so.

So I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately in hopes of actually putting pen to paper or hands to keyboard and penning my own book one day. I just finished New Moon from The Twilight Saga. Now I know there’s plenty to criticize when it comes to Twilight from both story and style views but the fact is that these books are very easily readable and therefore enjoyable due to their simplicity. I’ve already started Breaking Dawn and even though I’m not entirely a Twihard when it comes to Twilight I’m still getting enough out of them to make it all worthwhile. Do yourself a favor and pick these books up and read them or pick up the Harry Potter series, you’ll get some satisfaction out of finishing a book once in a while. I’m also in the process of reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Vivir Para Contarla and Donald McCaig’s Rhett Butler’s People. Thank you to all those who hand books my way, I’ll finish them all soon! I promise!