Currently reading
Swann's Way
Snow Country
Proust's Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time
The Mind At Night: The New Science Of How And Why We Dream
The Magic Mountain
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Advances in Semiotics)
Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima
The Inquisition of Climate Science
State of the World 2013: Is Sustainability Still Possible?
Media Studies: Texts, Institutions and Audiences
This novel would have done well to have the first half culled. Although the first half is pleasant enough as a travelogue, it soon began to feel tedious and I was pretty bored by the time the book began to pick up again.The last third is the best part of the book, so do try and push through until you get there...
The reason I'm giving the book such a low score is because I'd expected a bit more solid history from it, taking in account the title and the premise of the book.
I found the few scraps and tidbits the author threw at us about Count Dracul/Vlad Tepes wholly unsatisfying - I'd learned nothing from this book on that account, that I didn't already know, sadly.
What is indeed nice abut the book, are the descriptions of Eastern Europe, if what you had wanted was a travel book.
But then the blurb is all wrong...