I just finished reading Bram Stoker's Dracula, and I liked it very much! I'm planning a new AP English Literature course for next year on the theme of the monstrous and the humane (a few years ago the FGS English Department started offering a couple of AP Lit courses each year on different themes -- it's worked very well), and I'm thinking about this for summer reading.
There's obviously a ton to say about gender and sexuality in the novel, but I found myself even more interested in technology. Lots of emphasis on typewriters (including travel typewriters), phonographs, Kodak cameras, electric lights, and trains. But I also increasingly thought about the technology of vampirism and of salvation. There are a lot of rules for vampires and what they can and can't do (and I think I'd give that my students the project of coming up with a list of those rules as they read). There's a strong distinction in the novel between the soul and the body, and the vampire hunters' goal is to destroy the body so that they can save the soul. Mina Harker's potential damnation -- even though she is the essence of good Christianity -- was entirely about the technology of vampirism. The blessed communion wafer scorches her forehead, marking her as "unclean" before God, and it is only when Dracula dies and that scorch mark disappears that she can be holy again; her salvation has nothing to do with anything she herself does or believes or says. Fascinating.
I was reading this while visiting my mom, and she wisely asked me, "But do you want to spend your sabbatical preparing for a course? Aren't you supposed to be doing things that aren't all about school?" She is, on the one hand, totally right, and that's the very reason that at first I wanted to wait for another year before offering this new AP Lit course, so that I wouldn't spend my sabbatical doing course prep. But at the same time, summer reading does actually have to be decided before March, and I also actually enjoyed reading Dracula, so I'm happy to do the fun part of school while I'm on sabbatical, as long as I avoid the hard work of grading.