Sookie Stackhouse, the Final Five

So this is a review of books 5-9 plus the story collection "A Touch of Dead". What can I say, readers? These books were literary crack... as I said last time the series definitely gained momentum after the third book and pretty much kept going. Although I found some of the books, particularly the ones that took us away from Bon Temps, less well-done than others, I zipped through them all in record speed. Charlaine Harris has won her loyal readers over by creating an awesome cast of characters with reliable quirks and traits that almost read like Homeric epithets--Pam in her cream-colored sweaters, Eric's 2,000 years of experience in the ways of love, Claudine's outragious physique, etc. etc. Harris also fearlessly expresses her love of genre fiction by mixing three traditions together with impunity; romance, fantasy, mystery, with a touch of humor, and it's a bewitching concoction.

Unlike purveyor of even stronger crack/object of EBC scorn Stephanie Meyer, Harris has the guts to kill major players off, have characters change and evolve, and give them sex drives that actually lead somewhere beyond pouty looks and abortive makeout sessions. Essentially, her characters' actions result in consequences, as opposed to their heroine protecting everyone she thinks is speshul with a bogus "wuv shield" (yep, I'm still bitter about Breaking Dawn). This makes the pleasure of reading the books even less guilty.

Honestly, I can't wait for Dead in the Family.

The New Paranormal Romance Hero-Creature

Via bitch magazine blogs--now we know what those of us in Twilight and Sookie and Anita Blake withdrawal can look forward to next. Hilarious! Stiefvater gets a win from us, too. Check it out here:

Bibliobitch: Maggie Stiefvater from Bitch Magazine Blogs

Trying to Decode the Sookie Stackhouse Appeal

(image credit: chicklit.tumblr.com)

This is going to count as my review of Living Dead in Dallas, Club Dead and Dead to the world--and then I'll check in later on when I finish the series.

Details I loved in these books, in shorthand so as not to give spoilers: Eric, Eric and more Eric who is funnier and less cruel than in True Blood. Alcide and Debbie Pelt, two characters I cannot wait to see next season. Sam Merlotte. The hotshot community. The development of the Pam character. Portia Bellefleur.

Now that I'm almost halfway done with these books, I've revised my opinion a little bit. After the first book left me amused, but a bit cold, I waited until the first season of True Blood was over to try the second book. Well that--and the next two--were a pleasant surprise, totally hooked me in and have since been sucking me in with an intensity which almost touches a Twilight-binge--without the self-loathing but also without the really pulpy, breathless prose. I've been powering through each one in about 3 to 4 straight hours.

What amazes me is how similar Sookie's tale is to Bella Swan's, with two huge and notable exceptions: sex and the heroine's personality. Sookie is a randy, sassy woman who likes to get bitten, with a killer instinct--where Bella is a chaste cipher, its true. But they share an outsidery perspective and a sad home life, and the excitement in both their stories comes from being constantly battered, ending up in the hospital or locked up somewhere in a Nancy Drew-like situation, and toted around like a sack of potatoes by a bunch of brawny male supernatural beings. (They both take Vampire horseback err, piggy-back rides, for instance.) They both have dueling love interests fighting over them, and their primary attraction has to do with telepathy.

Of course the tone of both series is different: Sookie's story is funny and kooky, wherein lies much of its appeal. More and more wacky supernatural creatures keep popping into the universe and unlike JK Rowling's world, this one feels like it's just being made up on the fly, but there's something rather endearing and funny about that. Twilight of course, has a wry humor but is mostly very. serious. in an adolescent way.

All of this leads me to think that the time is very, very ripe for a vampire-lit satire. I'll get on that after I read 5 more Sookie Stackhouse books.

Dead Until Dark

Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris

My review>
rating: 3 of 5 stars
I picked up the first Sookie Stackhouse novel in the middle of Moby Dick to give myself a beach-read break (no one should go on a beach vacation without paging through a single beach read, even if the major novel you are otherwise reading is about The Sea).


Anyway, although it started off slow, I got into Dead Until Dark quickly : it's funny, sassy, sexy, well-paced and mysterious. Like the show it's the basis for, True Blood, it's all very absurd, particularly the fact that the townspeople in Bon Temps aren't all locked up in psych wards with extreme PTSD, but I digress...with a much stronger, funnier, more self-realized heroine than Twilight but the same "I'm protecting YOu" no "I'm protecting You" dynamic as those teen novels (and lots of very explicit sex), it's got all the heat of the Edward-Bella relationship without the ick factor. Sookie, southern waitress in short-shorts who loves beauty products through she is, actually considers the gendered implications of her relationship with Bill and values her independence. And then she has hot vampire sex with him and gets bitten. WORD.

So if you're looking for a breezy summer read that doesn't kill brain cells, I say don't be afraid to give Sookie a spin ;)

Thanks to Molly for lending me the book!

View all my reviews.

Visual Evidence of my Vacation Activities

Originally uploaded by fellowette

Like I said, I spent the week getting sunburned (even though the weather was cold) and reading Moby Dick, which was even more appropriate to being on Nantucket than I realized. Here is visual evidence of both. Oh, I also read Olive Kittredge and the first Sookie Stackhouse novel, and I will tell you all about them forthwith (I still owe you a review of Pamela).

I am 100 pages from the end of Melville's sea-epic. Any others out there waded into those heady prose-waters?

Question of the Weekend: What's on Your Summer List?

Mine includes Moby Dick, DuMaurier's Jamaica Inn, a re-read of the Emily of New Moon books, the Grapes of Wrath, and a Sookie Stackhouse novel or five. What are yours? Share them in comments! And recommend as many beach reads as you want.

Other summer lists:

60 new books to read this summer from Jacket Copy

Summer reading: Killer thrillers ...from Salon

What's on your summer reading list? from Entertainment Weekly's PopWatch

Summer Reading List from Restless Violet

Bill Compton > Edward Cullen

Here is the new True Blood "teaser." The show starts up again in a month:

As you may or may not know, the series is loosely based on the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris, which are supposed to be wildly addictive.

I know it's a loose adaptation, but I'm impressed with the general badassness that Harris and series creator Allen Ball have granted to heroine Sookie. While Bill Compton, her southern-gentleman vampire beau, may be kind of Cullenish, Sookie's way cooler, spunkier, and far more eager eager to murder bad guys by stabbing them with shovels than Bella Mary-Sue Swan ever would be. And for that I say thank you!

Quick Link: The New Yorker takes on Vampires

The New Yorker's Joan Acocella on Dracula and his ilk. It's a good piece! Here's my favorite part:

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Whether or not politics was operating in Stoker’s novel, it is certainly at work in our contemporary vampire literature. Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse series openly treats vampires as a persecuted minority. Sometimes they are like black people (lynch mobs pursue them), sometimes like homosexuals (rednecks beat them up). Meanwhile, they are trying to go mainstream. Sookie’s Bill has sworn off human blood, or he’s trying; he subsists on a Japanese synthetic. He registers to vote (absentee, because he cannot get around in daylight). He wears pressed chinos. This is funny but also touching. In “The Vampire Chronicles,” Anne Rice also seems to regard her undead as an oppressed group. Their suffering is probably, at some level, a story about AIDS. All this is a little confusing morally. How can we have sympathy for the Devil and still regard him as the Devil? That question seems to have occurred to Stephenie Meyer, who is a Mormon. Edward, the featured vampire of Meyer’s “Twilight,” is a dashing fellow, and Bella, the heroine, becomes his girlfriend, but they do not go to bed together (because of the conversion risk). Neither should you, Meyer seems to be saying to her teen-age readers. They are compensated by the romantic fever that the sexual postponement generates. The book fairly heaves with desire.

But in Stoker’s time no excitement needed to be added. Sex outside marriage was still taboo, and dangerous. It could destroy a woman’s life—a man’s, too. (Syphilis was a major killer at that time. One of Stoker’s biographers claimed that the writer died of it.) In such a context, we do not need to look for political meaning in Dracula’s transactions with women. The meaning is forbidden sex—its menace and its allure. The baring of the woman’s flesh, her leaning back, the penetration: reading of these matters, does one think about immigration?

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Check out the whole thing.