Dead Until Dark

So, I got my hair done about a week or so ago, and my colorist really likes Twilight, and then she was like, OMG, do you love Sookie Stackhouse? And I'm like, What's that? and she's like It's this series by Charlaine Harris who has a dirty, filthy mind, and the books that those True Blood shows are based on? And I'm like, Oh yeah, like these Southern vampires? Yeah, she says, they're like, mainstream, kind of, and "true blood" is this fake blood created by the Japanese that they can drink.

I'm in, I said.

She says, You don't have to wait until the 4th book, ifyouknowwhatImean.

You had me at filthy dirty. I told her.

So, the first one is called Dead Until Dark, and the main character is Sookie Stackhouse, who's psychic. She can read everyone's thoughts except for this one vampire, who she falls in love with right away. And, yes, vampires are "out" although they're mostly discriminated against.

What I found quite interesting, in comparison to other vampire stuff I'm been reading/watching lately, is what this book has in common with (particularly) the Twilight series and how it deviates.

An icky thing that the books have in common is that the vampire dudes, who are, of course, ridic-strong, are always picking up (literally) our fair heroine and carrying her around and holding her on their laps. WTF? Is that like, a thing I'm not aware of?

Aside from a little lap-sitting, Sookie's much more of a liberated woman then the teenager in Twilight - in fact, it's mainly Sookie who does the savin' in this book. Also there's like, lots and lots of sex. And fluid exchange:

Someone was stretched out beside me; it was the vampire. I could see his glow. I could feel his tongue moving on my head. He was licking my head wound.

Whhhhhaaaat?

This is by no means high literature, but it sure was a lot of fun and the perfect thing to read on a recent plane ride. It actually had a pretty good murder mystery that I didn't solve but wasn't too far fetched, and I like the universe she's created. I guess they're technically sci-fi, although I don't really like labeling things like that. I'd definitely suggest this to anyone as a better alternative to Twilight if one wanted to jump on the vampire bandwagon.

From Dead to Worse

When I first read a Sookie Stackhouse book, by Charlaine Harris, I was ashamed, yet titilated. The second time: more ashamed, but I had a lot of fun. Now I want to shamelessly read anything I can get my filthy hands on. Her books are fun, interesting, fast-paced, and they fill in the lonely blanks between seasons of True Blood.

Oddly, From Dead to Worse doesn't have ANY of Harris's trademark bloody vampire sex (but that's ok har har har), but this (I think) eighth book in the series was fresh and amusing. And still a little oowkie:

From his tension I realized that some major event was coming at me fast, and I began to be afraid. Eric took my hand as we walked across to the restaurant, and he ran his thumb absently across my palm. I was surprised to find out there was a direct line from my palm to my, my, hootchie.

Maps and Legends

I read Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends for my book club. I'm a big Chabon fan so I was quite sure I'd like it. By rather amazing coincidence, he was speaking at the uni where I work so I got to see him read just a few weeks before we met to discuss. That was a real treat.

Maps and Legends is a collection of essays/book reviews. For the most part, it's a defense of genre writing. Chabon rights about how, with some exceptions, genre writing (sci-fi, fantasy, etc) is not considered high literature. This is expressed on the best-seller lists and in the book stores, where there's a "literature" section, and then all those "other" sections. As a writer and a reader, Chabon's sensitive to that literal and figurative delegation to the "other". It is just those books that walk on the boundaries (he argues) that make for the most interesting stories anyway.

I'm a big believer that, at most, we should have a fiction and a non-fiction section in our book stores and libraries (but I'm leaning toward alphabetical by author across the board) so I really loved seeing my opinion so neatly matched with one of my favorite writers. Reading Maps and Legends was a lot like watching a Woody Allen film - it made me feel really smart when I got all his literary references (I'm a terrible elitist at heart, it's true).

What I didn't like about the book was how, in seeking to elevate genre stories, he found it necessary to denigrate a lot of contemporary fiction, which I also happen to enjoy. He also revealed something else that I won't go into for fear of ruining the book for you. However... at our book club we talked about how this book is so ... specialized, aggravating, elitist ... that there are basically no people that we'd recommend it to. For me, there were two people, and I've already told them. But, I'll leave you with one of the lovely bits, to spark your interest:

In the meantime, I had begun to publish stories of my own, stories, in some cases, about fathers who disappointed their sons. The fathers in these stories were golem-fathers. I wove alphabetical spells around them, and breathed life into them, and they got up and walked out into the world and caused trouble and embarrassment for the small man of the flesh and blood in whose image they had been cast. Or maybe it was I who was the golem, my father's goldem, animated by the enchantment of the narratives and lies, then rising up until I posed a danger to him and all the unlikely things that he, strangely enough, believed in.