Been very busy taking care of my father, who was hospitalized since December 16 until two days ago, so I've had little time to read (or anything else, really). Still managed to finish this year so far:

-Poems by Miguel Hernández (just some random compilation).

-Season in hell and Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud (I had read all of Rimbaud's prose and verse poetry over 20 years ago... all except Illuminations and some early unimportant prose works. Now I'm reading his complete works again and I finally read the poems I was missing.)

Finished Dracula last week, very enjoyable and once reading it really shows just how drastically different all the movies based on the book have been.

Reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein now.

I don't know any movie being even close to the book. Really good one!

Good health to your dad!

Finished a book in paper format for the first time in quite a while:
Follow the Saint by Leslie Charteris

Amusing but not very high level literature. Three novellas collected in a book.

Yep, just great entertainment really.

I've been a Saint fan since my mid teens, so for over 40 years now. To this day, I still sign many birthday cards and xmas cards, with the stick figure sign of the Saint ... halo and all.

They spoke to the Robin Hood in me .... something else I am a fan of.

Both great classics, which I read long ago, so can barely remember details of Dracula now ... not helped by all the vampire movies I have seen since. I should give it another read.

My biggest surprise was that Dracula's influence can be felt all throughout the book but the character himself only appears two or three times at most.

Frankenstein I am also enjoying but so far the atmosphere is quite different then from movies and TV that have used it.

Who was the real monster after all? The scientist (Dr. F) or his creation?

I guess that's up to interpretation, as it could be neither depending on your perspective.


Somewhat old school I guess, where much is left up to the reader's own imagination to fill in the blanks.

I guess movies concentrate more on the Gothic Horror aspect.

Im not really into reading but I plan to read more about satanic history.

I listened to Silus marner, finished that ( I still consider listening to audio books as finishing the book, I did not have time to read it)

Sure, it is a finished book, regardless of manner, but I can't get that last part. If somebody'd speak faster than I read, I wouldn't understand enough to even try to guess what was being said.

I just finished reading the collection of Tarpe Mills's original Miss Fury newspaper strips from 1941 to 1944. The book is billed as "the first female superhero by a female cartoonist" but it's a bit stretch to consider Miss Fury a superhero because she has no real superpowers or special training. She's just an ordinary (yet brave and capable) woman who occasionally wears a skintight catsuit (pre-dating Catwoman's modern look by multiple decades) and gets mixed up in adventures.

As these comics were made during WWII, most of the action involves the war in some way or another and the major villains are all Germans. Bruno Beitz is a general who loses his left arm early in the strip - he's a brute who has no hesitation in punching a woman in the jaw, yet he's very much at odds with the Nazi party. The strip takes pains to establish that the German military has a difficult relationship with the Nazis (Bruno literally says "#@$! the Fuhrer!"), and a major plot late in the book concerns Bruno's efforts to undermine Hitler and establish a new German state that can peacefully end the war (while preserving Germany's gains). Baroness von Kampf is a femme fatale who doesn't much care who wins the war so long as she gets rich. She makes the mistake of trying to double-cross some Brazilian mobsters and ends up with a swastika burned into her forehead, which she conceals under her long, thick bangs. Gruen is a Gestapo sleazebag - he and Bruno detest one another.

Mills is a very good artist, and being a former fashion model it's not surprising that she puts more effort than most artists would into beautifying her female characters, constantly changing up their appearances and putting them in fashionable clothes of the time. She didn't hesitate on violence or grit, though, and the strip is relatively gory at times. In one sequence, a German soldier who got his face blown off staggers about holding his face, blood seeping through his fingers, begging for someone to help him because he can't see where the door is.

The stories mix light elements of sci-fi, such as a special metal-dissolving element with obvious military implications, with real world issues such as a German plot to stage a coup in Brazil and use the country as its base for conquering the Americas. Mills uses coincidences a lot in her storytelling, but she uses them in ways that only make the stories more complicated and fun, bringing the characters together repeatedly and making them bounce off each other in unexpected ways. Her plotting is very thorough, dwelling at length on details most comics would brush aside, to the point that the strip will go literally months between appearances of the title character and even fewer appearances of her in costume. Mills seemed to arrive at the conclusion that it would strain credulity for an ordinary woman to constantly get into these adventures without being changed much, but the villains she could humiliate and mangle over and over because they're the ones who are always scheming and causing trouble. So the villains take up more and time until the strip becomes more of a soap opera about their petty rivalries than anything else.

well i can listen to books when i do other work for school. and i could speed them up by 1.25 speed to get it done a bit faster if they are a slow reader