Reading ebooks on the iPhone

So the reason I've been reading Dracula is the wonderful Classics app on my iPhone. The look and feel of the thing is incredible, and I love that I can read it in bed with the lights off. The pages are a lovely cream colour and I can flick them, silently, with a stroke of my finger. There's no difficulty in positioning the thing to see, as there would be with a hardcover, with my head on the pillow. If I stop turning pages, it shuts itself off. And it totally removes the need for a book light, which has already come in handy for me while sharing a hotel room earlier this month.

Thus far I haven't seen the appeal of e-readers (why would I want to start carrying yet another device?), but there is something wonderful about always having something to read right in my phone. For one thing, it makes my purse a lot lighter. It isn't the first e-reader I got for my iPhone, but so far it's the best. And since I downloaded it, there have been a bunch of similar applications released. I'm probably going to get something called the "Charles Dickens collection" next, because that will definitely be easier to lug around than the actual novels.

When it comes to buying e-books rather than paper books, I don't know where I stand. Everything I've been reading so far has been in the public domain. I'm so much of a bibliophile that I can't imagine not wanting the actual object, but possibly I would consider it for trashy reads -- say if I was somehow dying to read the new Dan Brown or something else I wouldn't want to actually ever put on a shelf. But we'll see.

But anyway, hurray for e-readers on the iPhone! From the looks of things, it sounds like Apple is well-positioned to take over the e-reader market. According to a story today on Mashable, book application downloads for the the iPhone have even outstripped game downloads.

Dracula: less sexy than your average True Blood vampire

So for reasons related mostly to my iPhone (more on that later), I've recently been rereading Dracula. I read it once for school back in first-year university, probably the night before the exam, and I remember really enjoying it and finding it impressively creepy. But I was shocked at what I didn't remember, which was most of it: Dracula's moustache, the novel's structure (a collection of diary entries, newspaper articles, letters), the terrifying story of the boat crossing as the sailors are done away with one by one, Van Helsing's conceit of laughter as a king after he is convulsed by uncontrollable mirth:

"Ah, you don't comprehend, friend John. Do not think that I am not sad, though I laugh. See, I have cried even when the laugh did choke me. But no more think that I am all sorry when I cry, for the laugh he come just the same. Keep it always with you that laughter who knock at your door and say, `May I come in?' is not true laughter. No! He is a king, and he come when and how he like. He ask no person, he choose no time of suitability. He say, `I am here.'..."

I've been astounded over and over again by how frightening and absolutely gripping Stoker's novel is, not to mention surprisingly modern. I've been reading it slowly over the past week to get into the Halloween spirit. In other literary Halloween news, last night I dressed up as a character from one of my favourite books, Alice in Wonderland:

In case you're wondering, the cake makes her get bigger.