About the Junkee

20 Questions

This was a post on Lost in Books called 20 Questions and I like it so much I thought I would modify it for my About Me section.

1. Last book(s) I bought:
   
   1. Midnighters #1: The Secret Hour (Kindle Edition)
   2. Wicked: Witch & Curse (Paperback)
2. Last book I got in the mail:
   
   1. The Host: A Novel (Hardcover)
3. The first book I've read over and over:
   
   1. Grimm's Fairy Tales
4. Children’s book every child should read:
   
   1. Anne of Green Gables (Girl)
   2. Lord of the Flies
   3. Charlotte's Web
   4. The Lion the Witch & the Wardrobe
   5. A Wrinkle in Time
   6. Where the Red Ferns Grow...I could go on and on.
5. Favorite place to read:
• The bath tub
6. A book I bought just for the cover:
• I noticed Twlight for its cover and went to buy it, but was distracted by a the Kim Harrison book that came out. I put the book down and came back later when I heard about it from a friend.
7. Scariest book ever read:
   
   1. Fiction: I read It by Stephen King in 5th grade and it scared me silly
   2. Non-fiction: Communion by Whitley Strieber, I don't think it would have scared me so much if it wasn't supposed to have really happened
8. Most romantic book ever read:
• Romeo & Juliet - yeah it doesn't have a happy ending, but I was never one to believe in "And they lived happily ever after." Since I was a child I knew that wasn't true.
9. Book that changed my life in some way:
• Where the Red Ferns grow taught me the emotion of reading, Old Dan and Little Ann were the first characters I fell in love with as a child
10. Book I’ve re-read the most times:
• Brave New World
11. Book I needed the Cliff’s Notes for:
• The Grapes of Wrath
12. Book you needed the dictionary for:
• None
13. Book I like that no one else seems to:
• My own writing... :)
14. Book I don’t like that everyone else seems to love:
• Vulnerable
15. Number of books I own (you can guess):
• I lost all of my books (2005 and earlier) from Katrina and slowly I have been building back up. I've been using the library more since the storm. I would put my collection at maybe 150 right now.
16. Number of books on my TBR list (that you have not acquired yet):
• 200+
17. Must-have reading accessories:
• kindle
18. Literary Destination I Want to Go to:
• Greece - from my fascination with Socrates and Greek Mythology brought on by reading the Illiad & Odyssy
19. Top Three Favorite Authors: (This changes a lot! But I find myself always going back to Clarke & Heinlein)
    
    1. Arthur C. Clarke
    2. Richelle Mead
    3. Robert A. Heinlein
20. The reasons I started Book Bloggin':
    
    1. Laurell K. Hamilton, specifically the Anita Blake series book, Danse Macabre, I had read some reviews on Amazon.com and thought they were a great idea, but never really did one. Once I read DM, I had to write a review, hoping that LKH would read it and maybe apply it to her next books. I was so disgusted with the book and the way the series had turned. This in turn led me to reviewing on Amazon.com
    2. Amazon.com is in control of those reviews though, and there are some people that troll them. I wanted control, so I started my blog 2 weeks ago. I love it.

I would love to see other bloggers answer these questions! If you do so, leave a comment and I'll post a link under this!

 

My First Review

Danse Macabre by Laurell K. Hamilton

Borrow Don't Buy!

In life, I usually enjoy being sucked into a series. Whether it is a good book series, or even a television series. Yet, what I find with any good series, especially when they have science fiction or fantasy undertones, there is only so much that you can do with that series. Which is where we find Laurell K. Hamilton's, Danse Macabre. I have quite enjoyed the series, even when she went a little overboard with the wanton and sexually explicit material in the later series. Anita Blake has always been a very rich character with inner turmoil and her fair share of bad guys to pummel but where do you go from there, especially when the heroine has powers that hardly anyone can rival, a list of conquest (bad guys, not lovers) a mile long, a host of body guards, minions and friends / superheroes that can defeat almost anything. Well, for Hamilton, you go deeper in with the porn. After she published Micah, which was more of a novella, (which only had one overdone sex scene) I thought she would turn more to deeper plots, bigger baddies, or more emotional issues, which she is so fond of. But, instead, there wasn't even one definitive bad guy, and the biggest problem she had was that she might be pregnant. To get my point across, the first four chapters are spent with nothing but an over blown dialogue between her and her friend Ronnie, with once again, Anita defending her choice of men. This dialogue almost word for word, also with Ronnie, was in another of the books. Okay, after the already been-there-done-that dialogue, what's next, well a sex scene what else? But, of course not just any sex scene, but a sex scene that has gone where no Hamilton sex scene has gone before, and personally I never thought I would ever read a book with a sex scene like this in it. Well, you never know where life takes you, right? Then the book just spiralled into to more sex, a few political maneuvering which entailed Anita agreeing to having more sex at a later date, then more sex, defending her non-slutness, more sex, agreeing to having more sex at a later date, more sex, hospital, more sex...and oh yeah, more sex. The girl had a pretty busy day, and the only time she wasn't having sex, with no more than four or was it five?, yet no less than two (which doesn't include the people standing around watching) she was unconscious - because the sex got too rough.

I will not buy another Anita Blake novel, which saddens me, because I really like the series, or should I say liked. Its just too much. I skipped through most of the sex scenes and it left me with a novel that was just unimaginative and boring. Well, maybe I can't say unimaginative, because some of those positions....OK I won't get into that. And it is so not that my delicate sensibilities are offended by the sex, they are not - but like everything else too much can get a little over the top. I mean, I know she is a supernatural superpower, but come on - thirty big O's in one little setting. I'm more likely to believe that George W. is the king of vamps, before I believe that is possible!

If you like the series, wait for naive buddy to buy it and borrow it when they finish it. (I'm that naive buddy). Just don't waste your time and get your hopes up, when I read the last page, closed the book, I was extremely disappointed and I hate reading a book like that.