Bookish Thoughts

This book is like a warm hug. It's about vampires, yes. But it's also about healing from trauma. And baking cinnamon rolls. It's a very, very slow book, and the narrator tends to babble. The plot doesn't really exist. It's just a cozy way to spend some time with a bunch of people who love each other a lot and don't want anything more than their quiet little life. I've read this book several times now. I'll probably read it several more. Every now and then, it's exactly what I need.

Reading the first page of this book was live diving into a pile of pillows. This is a cozy little story about a baker who enjoys a simple life with her family in the wake of a supernatural war that decimated the human population. She just wants to make cinnamon rolls and read trashy novels. And then she gets kidnapped by vampires and finds herself in way over her head. I loved it when I read it two years ago, and re-reading it was a bit like coming home. The narrator and main character, Rae "Sunshine" Seddon, babbles. She goes off on tangents and loses herself down rabbit holes. The story gets a bit circuitous, as she occasionally backs up to explain this or that detail. And I could see people getting frustrated with her. But I honestly love it, and I think McKinley pulls off the chatterbox character superbly. It adds a level of cozy intimacy to the book, like you're hanging out with a mug of tea while your best friend tells you about the crazy weekend she just had. P...

I mean this in the best possible way: this book is like is Twilight  grew up. By which I mean that the vampire in this book finds himself besotted with an actual adult: a tenured professor of history with a particular interest in alchemy. They're somewhat more mature about their whirlwind romance, and Diana starts off with the backbone that Bella didn't find until halfway through the last book. But this is still a whirlwind romance between an over-protective and possessive vampire and a naive and somewhat ignorant woman who's only too happy to be swept off her feet. I loved every minute of it. It's not a perfect book. The exposition can get a bit clumsy. The romance is possibly too dark for some tastes and there's some questionable things about it. But this is fantasy, not real life. Sometimes you just want to get lost in a chilly story about a girl and the over-protective vampire who has fallen head over heels for her and, oh yeah, they have to save the world. ...

It's been about fifteen years since I first read this book back in high school, but it turns out that I'm still a little bit in love with Lestat. I guess that first love never really goes away. Reckless, blonde, devil-may-care vampires who fall in love at the drop of a hat do it for me every time. The Vampire Lestat  is a much better book than Interview With a Vampire , mostly because Lestat is a much more interesting character than Louis. He's curious without descending into brooding. He tries to be moral without getting self-righteous about it. He makes mistakes, but he's mostly able to learn from them and move on. And he's just so in love with the world around him that you can't help but fall a bit in love with him, too. This book is epic and romantic. It dragged a bit at times, especially in the middle. But the payoff is so rewarding. I love the deep dive into vampiric lore and how their culture has changed over the centuries. I love the way answers are ...

The thrilling conclusion to Justin Cronin's Passage trilogy is certainly epic. And meandering. Once again, he jumps back into the past to flesh out the backstory of characters in the present. This time with a lengthy look into what Zero was like as a human that could almost be its own book. This sounds like a complaint, but it's not really. Cronin takes the same care with his characters and settings that Robert Jordan did in The Wheel of Time . He manages to be more concise, but only because his scope is (amazingly) smaller than Jordan's was. And because his baddies don't keep resurrecting themselves. Dead is actually dead in this world. Looking back on the trilogy as a whole, I'm glad I read it. I enjoyed it a lot. But I'm not sure I'd ever recommend it. It hit so many of my specific buttons that I'd have trouble believing someone else would like it as much as me. It's immense and slow. It's about vampires. It's a little bit mystic beyo...

Coming off one of my least-favorite Discworld  books, we head straight into my favorite one. I don't necessarily think it's the best book in the series, though it's certainly up there. But it pits the Witches (my favorite main characters) against a family of vampires (my favorite villain). So of course I'm going to love it. And there's a lot to love here. Magrat has just had a baby is trying to figure out how to be a queen and a witch while taking care of a newborn. Granny Weatherwax makes her biggest sacrifice yet in an attempt to defeat the vampires, and there's legitimate concern that her methods may cause her to join them instead. Agnes is still trying to figure out where she ends and Perdita begins, all while fighting off the unwelcome romantic attentions of one of the vampires. And an Omnian priest with serious doubts finds himself on an adventure he never asked for. One of my favorite things about this book is the interactions between Agnes and Vlad, ...

I knew going in that The Twelve  was not as well-received as The Passage . This is often the case with the second installment in a series. Too often they serve as mere bridges from the intriguing beginning to the thrilling conclusion, with little meat of their own. This wasn't entirely the case with The Twelve , which I though was similar in style and scope to its prequel. It meandered a lot, but the so did the first book. There was an enormous cast of characters, spread over multiple locations. But I ultimately found it just as heart-rending and entertaining as the first book. One thing that frustrated me early on was Cronin's decision to return to the immediate aftermath of the viral outbreak. Most of the characters I cared about live 100 years after this point, and it seemed weird to focus on a group of people who were definitely going to die, one way or another, before the main focus of the book. But as the story progressed and the threads came together, this return to ...

I first read The Passage many years ago and absolutely loved it. It's a sprawling, epic tale about vampires. It stretches from coast to coast and covers about 100 years, from the time when the vampires first appeared to when the resistance to them starts to actually be effective. There's a lot in this book, especially since it has to establish two entirely different casts of characters a century apart from each other, linked only by the girl Amy, humanity's last hope. Because thus book has such a wide scope, it is occasionally pretty slow. Because of that, I think it held up better on the re-read. It didn't drag nearly as much as I remembered, mostly because I knew where it was headed and why Cronin was slowing down to include the details he was. The end result is a very rich book about a rampant virus and vampires and the near end of the world. It's about humanity's ability to hang on to hope even when all hope is lost, and to keep fighting even when we know...

Sometimes you find out that one of your favorite authors has written about one of your favorite topics and you end up with a new favorite book. It's one of the best experiences you can have as a reader - when a book perfectly meets your sky-high expectations. I started reading Robin McKinley years ago for her fantastic retellings of classic fairy-tales. She's great at taking the traditional damsel in distress and giving her enough strength and motivation to solve her own problems. And those strengths are less about fighting and more about family and friendship and nurturing. They're traits that are traditionally seen as feminine being raised to heroic status because it's through them that the princess saves the day. So when I found out she'd turned her focus to vampires for a book, I knew I had to get my hands on it. If you didn't grow up with Buffy , it's perhaps strange to describe a vampire book, particularly one where the vampires are definitely scar...

I loved this book so much. I'm already biased in favor of anything about vampires, so that's probably not a huge shocker. But this was a fantastic story that made the vampires sympathetic. It also pulled a neat trick of dealing with racism by way of a metaphor, but keeping a black character at the front and center of it. The narrator of the story is a young vampire named Shori, who wakes up all alone and with no memory of who or what she is. Over the course of the book, more and more of her personal and cultural history are revealed, and I was hooked every step of the way. I found everything about this to be fascinating. My only gripe is the language, which was straightforward to the point that it distracted me. It makes sense for an amnesiac child to speak in short, direct sentences. And the language did eventually fade into the background of the gripping tale. But I've been reading so much beautiful prose lately that it was a bit of a shock to come acros...

Promise me vampires, and I will follow you pretty much anywhere. To Mormon propaganda masquerading as teen angst in Washington or violent soap operas in Lousiana. To an apocalyptic future or a dense history. To whiny Louis and impulsive Lestat and the many repetitions of their love triangle with poor Claudia. And always, always, back to a Hellmouth in Southern California. I blame this on being exposed to Spike at a formative age. The point is that I was predisposed to like this book and am horribly biased in favor of it. The second I heard the Guillermo del Toro was tackling vampires on FX this summer, I got excited. Everything about that combination makes me think I'll like it. And then I found out that it's going to be based on a book (which was written after the initial television pitch failed), and I ran out to get my hands on it. This story is vampires meets CSI. The initial attack is broken down and studied by a couple of CDC doctors who go to great len...

Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian was an incredibly slow, dry book. There was a good amount of suspense and spookiness surrounding the search for Dracula that spans three generations. But there was a whole lot of history mixed in. I found myself unable to read large chunks at once, because my mind would start to wander. That's not to say it was a bad book, though. The horror was good and some passages were genuinely frightening. It's just that it was mixed in with an incredibly thorough history lesson about the conquest of Transylvania, Hungary, and Bulgaria by the Ottoman Empire. There's a lot of allusion to the historical and present-day conflict between Islam and Christianity in the region. And the legend of Vlad the Impaler is interwoven so seamlessly that I has trouble telling what was fact and what was fiction at times. There was a lot of cool speculation about the legend of Vlad Dracula. And I really liked seeing how that intersected with hist...

"Louis, Louis, Louis. Still whining after all these years." That quote isn't actually from the book. It's Lestat's final line in the 1994 movie adaptation. But, damn, is it an appropriate summation of this book. Anne Rice's Interview With a Vampire was a genre changer. It was the first mainstream media that took a sympathetic view towards vampires. They're just lonely immortals at the top of the food chain who spend their free time reading poetry, visiting the opera, and looking for other vampires to share eternity with. Not all the different from you or me. This also introduced a dynamic that has been repeated in vampire literature ever since. We get Louis, the brooding brunette who doesn't want to kill people; Lestat, the partying blonde who's just out to have a good time and who cares about the body count; and Claudia, the super special girl that they're both obsessed with. This dynamic has gotten a ton of mileage from Bu...

The Passage , by Justin Cronin, is a beast of a book.  It's a sprawling, epic story told in 766 pages. And when I was halfway through it, I learned that it's only the first novel in a planned trilogy. Which...I can see where the story is going in the next book. I definitely think there's enough plot left to keep things interesting for two more books. But the last thing I need right now is another epic series. So, The Passage . The only thing I knew when I started it was that it was about vampires. I mentioned this to my boyfriend's mom when she loaned it to me, and she was quick to say that they aren't really vampires. They don't have a lot of the classic "vampire" characteristics. But the thing is, every vampire legend picks and chooses the bits of the legend they want to use. Bram Stoker's vampires couldn't cross running water and had to sleep in the soil of their homeland. Anne Rice's vampires absolutely could not change t...

I was so excited to start this book. I love Eric after he loses all his memories, not to mention the fact that he and Sookie finally get together. Charlaine Harris successfully weaves two separate plots together in a non-jarring way, by using Jason's disappearance as a red herring. Unfortunately, the cracks are starting to show. Though Harris is really good at coming up with an interesting story, she's not so great at remembering what she's already written. The reviews I've read about her new book complain that it's full of inconsistencies with the rest of the series and that she seems to flat out ignore her own previous writing. Or maybe it's just a really shabby attempt to retcon the series so she can take it where she wants it to go. Even this early in the series, it seems that she can't be bothered to maintain the details of the world she's created. Here's a nit-picky list of the facts that Charlaine Harris can't keep straight. ...

In which... Eric cuddles with Sookie We meet Alcide Sookie and Alcide have breakfast and play scrabble. There's sexual tension, but no sex Sookie and Alcide dispose of a corpse together Alcide's ex-girlfriend tries to kill Sookie Sookie gets staked Eric is hot Sookie and Eric have friendship and sexual tension. They almost have sex but Elvis Bubba interrupts them Seriously, why isn't Bubba in True Blood ? He's awesome Sookie stakes her first vampire Sookie rescues Bill from torture and imprisonment In return, Bill rapes and nearly kills Sookie Eric saves Sookie (again) Sookie and Bill break up! Eric pays to have Sookie's driveway re-graveled, because he's thoughtful like that Man I am so glad that relationship is over. I know I'm biased, but this is my blog. I can be whatever I want. Once again, this book is a lot of fun. True Blood takes this story to the extremes of ridiculous. But it basically boils down to a bunch of hot guys who w...

Living Dead in Dallas has an interesting structure. There are two basic plots, an A plot and a B plot. But instead of being interwoven, they get chopped up. The first two chapters deal with the first half of the B plot. This is then completely forgotten as the A plot takes over most of the book. After the A plot wraps up, we get a few chapters to segue back into the B plot and tie off some loose ends. I guess it works? It feels a little disjointed, though. In the main plot, Sookie is off to Dallas to try and discover the whereabouts of a missing vampire named Farrel. It turns out he has been kidnapped by the Fellowship of the Sun church who want to sacrifice him in order to show their congregation the power of Jesus. Another vampire, Godfrey, is in cahoots with the church. He wants to die, to atone for his sins. Apparently he believes that God will even forgive 1000 years of child molestation and murder if he just asks Him to. I guess, technically, that is how it works...

This is my second time through the Sookie Stackhouse books. I'm hoping to get through the first four before the 4th season of True Blood premieres. Given that the premiere is still several weeks away and it only takes a couple of days to read each of these books, that shouldn't be a problem. I got into these books because of the HBO series. I've been obsessed with vampires since I started watching Buffy in 6th grade. My mom fed this obsession with Anne Rice novels and old movies. The first silent film I ever saw was Nosferatu, which we rented because Eddie Izzard was in the modern spoof of it. Also classic vampires. So when True Blood premiered the summer after college when I was unemployed, I had to start watching. And when I found a box set of the first nine books on sale for $27 I couldn't not buy it. The first season of the show stays much closer to the books than any of the other seasons. I maintain that the books are far better. To be fair, I al...