It’s raining, it’s pouring
As the Wodehouse Library filled up this morning with boys soaked through from the awful and unrelenting rain, I found myself reading an article on the Connell Guides website* about a rainy night in an Italian villa in 1816.
I can call this serendipity because although I was searching quite deliberately for something related to vampires in literature, I wasn’t expecting to learn that inclement weather had caused Lord Byron to suggest that he and his companions (Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and Byron’s doctor John Polidori) should knuckle down and write ghost stories. Almost 200 years later, how many of us would spend a wet evening in writing a ghost story?
Anyhow, why was I looking for vampire related material? Because I found an abandoned page of notes about Dracula on the photocopier is the answer. If they are your notes, come and collect them and then spend some time reading the (short) Connell Guides article in the Review of January 2015. Then click on the link in that article and read a review from Michael Dirda the Washington Post that highlights why reading is a great way of gleaning information that you weren’t necessarily in search of as you find out about something you were looking for. In summary, reading is good for you.
*see the Online Resources page for login details
