Summer Reading

I clearly haven't been paying enough attention. It all started while perusing the Best Worst Book discussion on Library Thing. They mentioned Linda Berdoll's Mr Darcy Take A Wife, and I was interested and the next thing I knew I'd read both of her "sequels" to Pride and Prejudice. I won't go into them in detail here (Todd and Jason have already heard me tell them enough of about them already) but they are fun, they are ridiculous, they are sexy, and they are absolutely not Jane Austen. And they most definitely do belong on that Library Thing discussion topic. I gulped all 429 pages of the first one down within 24 hours and once I located the second, Days and Nights At Pemberly, among the stacks at the library, I read it just as quickly. When I picked it up at the library, (I was surprised that it was in the "fiction" section, an not "romance") I noticed another book just a few feet away - An Assembly Such As This by Pamela Aiden, which is part of a trilogy of books retelling P&P from Darcy's point of view, and grabbed it as well. Since then I did a quick look on Amazon and apparently there are many, many, many retellings of P&P (beyond the most famous Bridget Jone's Diary and Clueless) and several that are from Darcy's point of view. I had no idea how insanely popular Austen was (I mean I knew she was popular) and that there was this much fan fiction has actually been published and is available in my library. I guess it's a whole subgenre of ChickLit. I'm wondering just how many of them I'll be able to slog my way through before the faux regency speak kills me or completely rearranges my vocabulary. While I know Todd isn't going to take me up on this (and probably not Carol either) but I'm suggesting you all give Berdoll a try, especially if you are headed to a beach.

Fortunately, at the same time I'm making my way through Charlaine Harris', Sookie Stackhouse Vampire series so I have a little balance. The Sookie Stackhouse books are a lot of fun, especially for folks familiar with the ARKLATEX area. Harris is from Magnolia, Ar, and she really does a good job of creating a sense of place and bringing the setting alive, even if it is populated with the undead. Harris is of course compared to Anita Blake and Anne Rice, and while there are sexy ancient vampires (and other things that go bump in the night)she's sort of doing something else too. Like that other vampire creator, Joss Whedon, she's well aware that the mundane can be horrifying as well, and she also does a good job of picking at themes of race, sex, and class. Her characters are both funny and heartbreaking, and I'm looking forward to seeing what she does with them. If you do decide to check them out, you should probably read them in order. I started in the middle, but I've gone back to the beginning and while I never mind being spoiled, some folks do and there are alot of revelations about previous situations that come up again in later books.