I finished Dracula last night and it was a really good book. Neither gothy nor pandering to those who are enamored of the supernatural. In fact, one of the more clever things that it does is wrap itself in Christianity and work the vampire thread into that existing cloth. It was also very true to the Simpsons Halloween Special.

The book was very nicely balanced and suspenseful despite being a little dated in its storytelling style (“Mina’s Diary – October 10 – This is written on the train on route to...”). I hadn’t planned on ever getting around to reading it, but a while ago I bought a used copy on a whim and now I am quite happy I did. Thank god for reading. Where would I be without it?

I wonder what it was like to be Bram Stoker. There was probably a point in his life where he was just wanting to be an author, write some books, and gain some small measure of immortality in someone’s card catalog somewhere. He might have been just a totally average guy with a wife and four kids who liked to have a brandy at the club before going home after a hard day’s work at the bank. I wonder what he was like before his name became a synonym for the macabre?

I finished the book last night right before I went to sleep, and all night long, strangers kept popping into my dreams and telling me about books they had read, asking if I’d read them too, and what I thought about the books. When I woke up this morning I was really wishing I was in a book club, ideally a book club that had just finished reading Dracula.

I do miss being in a book club, but at the same time, it was something of a hassle to have a book club. I always went to book club like I was writing a school report – I had always read the book and had my copy all marked up with post-its on passages that merited discussion or put forth interesting ideas.

But it seemed like generally half or less of the people there had read the book, and boy, was I ever the only one with sticky notes poking out. So it was pretty rare that we’d have a deeply interesting discussion, except for the book we all hated, and then we had a long conversation trying to dissect exactly why we hated the book.

Selecting the book for next month was probably the most enjoyable part. It was fun to advocate for a book you love, and neat to hear other people putting forth a book or two and explaining why they liked it.

One of my friends has a book club that goes to restaurants for its meetings. This seems to me a very clever idea. It is naturally time constrained so that you don’t have any awkward hanging out at somebody’s house after they’re well sick of the company, and it’s in a neutral location so that you don’t have to figure out who is going to host next or worry about cleaning bathrooms before book club.

Much as I love hanging out in other people’s houses, I have to admit that having a book club in a third-party location is a pretty brilliant idea. Yeah, I miss it. If I wasn’t feeling so overcommitted and short on time already, I would probably be seriously looking for someone’s club to join.

I need the Daily Comics Club. That would suit my free time profile better. “Hey, did you see Marmaduke yesterday? Why isn’t Marmaduke ever funny? It’s not a drama Apartment 3G kind of comic, so why isn’t it funny? Is it sending coded messages to overseas operatives or something? Is the Federal government subsidizing it?” We’d all roll our eyes at Marmaduke, the light would change, and off we’d go back to our normal lives.