Treat on Tuesday, Trick on Wednesday

I look forward to giving you a treat on Tuesday October 30 at Second Cup in Kensington/Sunnyside (corner of 10th Street and 3rd Avenue NW) and a trick on Wednesday October 31 at Vendome (940 2nd Avenue NW), reversing the order I had originally planned.

It was a little over two centuries ago, on a dark and stormy night in 1816, that Mary Shelley created the monster Frankenstein and one of her companions at that villa on Lake Geneva that night wrote a story that foreshadowed Dracula (eighty years before Bram Stoker’s 1897 contribution). My book share on October 31 at Vendome will provide a bit of history on those nineteenth century contributions to our ways of thinking. That’s my trick for Halloween.

But I’ll give you a treat on October 30 at Second Cup. Less than ten years after Bram Stoker’s story appeared, along comes James Allen (born in Leicester, England in 1864) with his little book As a Man Thinketh, and it becomes a classic for the twentieth century. This one is inspiring and reassuring. We needed it after a century that had given us Frankenstein and Dracula. That will be my book share for October 30, and my treat.

Arthur