Current reading spree.

[osaraba]

A Caress of Shadows by Laurell K. Hamilton (F):

Oooooh! This one was very good! The main character, Meredith Gentry, a half-breed faerie princess of the Unseelie court, is everything Hamilton’s other heroine Anita Blake isn’t but should be! Delicious! She’s comfortable with her sexuality and sensuality, she’s not a prude, she’s not afraid of sex like Anita is, she’s not a political dumb blonde, and best of all, she really knows how to take control. Not that Anita can’t take control in certain situations, but it’s more of a threat of violence than a political maneuver for her. Merry kicks ass.

My only protest was the length of the book; only 300-something pages. A quick read for $23. Satisfying, but short. Ah well. Hopefully, there will be even more for the next book.

Faith of the Fallen by Terry Goodkind (F):

Angelica got the 6th book in Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series, in paperback, for me as the rest of my belated December gift. She read it first, which although I understand that she had started it in the bookstore, was kind of hidoi considering she gave it to me as a gift. (The things one lets one’s friends get away with.) Anyway, she liked it better than the last book (damn, I can’t believe that I can’t remember what it’s called) and I agree with her. It was much more interesting. However. I got very tired of the whole anti-socialism message/rant of the whole book. I mean, I think I got the picture pretty early on, there was no need to reinforce it and reinforce it and reinforce it to death. Every other page, I expected to hear "The Commies are coming! The Commies are coming!"

So, it was a great read – lots of action, and it followed Richard for much of the time (unlike the last book), but the anti-socialism/pro-capitalism lecture was tedious and redundant.

Destiny by Sharon Green (F):

Destiny is the 8th book in Sharon Green’s Blending series (actually, 3rd in The Blending Enthroned series). This (aside from one of her older short romantic suspense novels) is the only series that I like by Sharon Green. She’s written a few other ones, but they’ve never interested me – I read one or two of the books and didn’t like them. So, I was very excited about this series because I really do like the whole premise of the series. The only thing that I found to be odd was the way Green had her characters speak. All her characters – even the unimportant ones that only last a few pages – speak in a peculiar manner, in which they practically explain their whole thinking process in the few sentences they speak. It’s kind of odd and silly, because no one really speaks that way. Everyone holds back some part of what they’re thinking when they speak. I mean, you don’t go around saying, "Wow, I think that dress looks really nice on you. But that’s mostly because you’re not as pretty as I am and so an ugly dress matches what you really look like. Oh, and you shouldn’t be upset by me saying this because it’s only the truth." See what I mean by unrealistic?

So a few books into the series I thought, maybe she’s doing it on purpose? It’s to emphasize the fact that this is a fantasy world, right? The whole history of their world is completely different from ours and so their odd manner of speech is to emphasize this! (I felt very proud of my pet theory.) And since that less-recent romance novel did not have this sort of odd language, it didn’t disprove my theory.

Nope. That came about a year ago, when I picked up one of Green’s more recent romantic suspense novels. The same odd manner of speech was present in that book, too. But there, it was completely inappropriate; the main male character was a cop – a character who would definitely not speak all of what’s on his mind. It was a little more understandable for the main female character, who was a mystery writer. But it was also not understandable for the suspects to speak this way. I mean, they were all being blackmailed for cripes’ sake! Of course they wouldn’t speak all that was on their minds!

So I became terribly disappointed after realizing that, not only was my pet theory disproved, but Green could not even be bothered to adjust her writing according to propriety! My faith in her – what little there was – was completely shaken!

But I have to say that The Blending and The Blending Enthroned series were two of the best series I’ve read! What I enjoyed most was the way that the main characters kept learning about their powers throughout all of the books, right up until the end of the last (and final) book of the series! In many series, the first and/or second book(s) are reserved for "learning" about powers, but after that, the learning seems to stop, except for the random newly learned trick here and there. But Green’s characters kept discovering new things all the time; it was very exciting to discover right along with them.

After reading these two good, but disappointing books… I ran out. It seems as if I had had a mountain of books in my "waiting to be read" pile, but when I finished these, all I had left was the last 30 or 40 pages of J.D. Robb’s latest romantic suspense Reunion in Death, whose end, at least, was satisfying. Cat fights are always fun to watch, ne? After which, I had nothing to read and I was going a bit stir-crazy, but then I happened to go to a library with Liz where I found a copy of Terry Goodkind’s most recent book in the Sword of Truth series – The Pillars of Creation, which is still in hardcover, and I refuse to buy it in hardcover; sorry, but Goodkind just isn’t worth $30! So I’ve started reading that, but the beginning is a bit boring so far, mostly because it’s starting with characters we’ve never met before and so we have no idea what’s going on.

::sigh::

What I’m really waiting for/looking forward to Mercedes Lackey’s latest, a retelling of a classic fairy tale, set in a world with magic very similar to that of The Blending series (elemental magic). This one is called The Gates of Sleep (a retelling of Sleeping Beauty) and is the second book that takes place in her world of elemental magic. The first book is a retelling of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Although I can’t remember the name of it at the moment, I do remember that I enjoyed it very much. The setting is actually an alternate reality of the Victorian age of Great Britain (if I remember correctly), with the only "alternate" part being the secret existence of elemental mages.